“In just six months we’ve changed the labor movement,” newly elected AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney told the labor federation’s convention delegates last October. “Now we’re going to change America.” It was the bravado of victory speeches, to be sure, …
Last spring, Cruising, a 1980 film about a serial killer who stalks the gay sex clubs of New York City, played before packed houses at San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema. Little controversy attended the week-long run at the city’s premier revival …
Two years ago I came to know a forty-year old woman living in a housing project in a decayed industrial city north of Boston. When I met Lois, she had just lost her job at Head Start after her car …
The End of Racism is an ambitious book. It seeks to demonstrate that liberal policies and the culture and behavior of African Americans, rather than racism, lie at the root of black Americans’ problems. It attempts to dismantle pragmatism and …
Democratic politics in the world’s oldest democracy is losing popular appeal. Public cynicism about what government, or politics, can accomplish is rampant. American voting turnout has been declining for decades, though with occasional upticks. At the same time, Americans are …
If the 1995 off-year election provides any portents for 1996, they are that the best the Democrats can hope for is a defensive victory. In the November elections in Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, and elsewhere, the Democrats did not run …
On Monday, maybe a million black men will march on Washington. Coming after the O. J. Simpson verdict, the march promises to be a pivotal moment in our nation’s life. As the writer Greg Tate has rightly noted, the verdict …
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History predictably earned him a skeptical response when it appeared a few years ago, especially from critics on the left, many of whom, one suspects, had not read the book. (There are some notable exceptions, …
The story that I want to tell about the new American right begins with the takeover of the Republican party by Barry Goldwater and his friends in 1964. Think of that as a dress rehearsal—though we thought it real enough …
In this issue of Dissent you will find, for the first time in an American publication, George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm. This essay, a product of Orwell’s difficulties in getting his anti-Stalinist novella into print, offers an axiom: …
I am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud’s suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into “science,” for nothing in his article “The Unknown Freud” (New York Review of Books, November 18, 1993) grants Freud’s work …
Contrary to what many conservatives assert, preferential treatment is not something new to our patterns of public policy. Moreover, it has an ethical basis in what might be called a “higher public purpose”—that of undoing and compensating for a long …
The invitation to respond to David Plotke’s essay, “Racial Politics and the Clinton-Guinier Episode” (Dissent, Spring 1995) came as I was preparing to travel to Budapest to attend a conference hosted by Eastern and Central European academics and politicians. This …
President Bill Clinton is a Southerner. That fact alone may explain why, given the opportunity to rethink the logic and effect of affirmative action, he failed. In his July speech at the National Archives before a largely black audience, the …
In many European countries, far-right political parties have made important gains. During the past year, elections in France, Belgium, Austria, and Italy have shown the extreme right consolidating its grip and steadily attracting new voters. If we add to this …
