Bill Clinton campaigned for his current job by reminding America what had happened during twelve years of Republican rule. He pointed out that wealth was transferred from the poor to the wealthy; he described an economy sapped of strength by …
I set out recently to read the complete novels of Toni Morrison with a mix of expectation and resentment that was probably unavoidable. What Lawrence called the “mob-self” had heard the tremendous chorus of celebration, crescendoing in the Nobel Prize. …
“Integration: the interval in a neighborhood between the moment the first black family moves in and the last white family moves out.” This bit of folk sociology made the rounds in Chicago during the bloody open occupancy and fair housing …
It is troubling that so many listen to Farrakhan. If no one listens his becomes a voice in the wilderness. But listening transforms monologue into relationship. Farrakhan’s audiences are predominantly black, but blacks are not his only listeners. Jews listen, …
In a February 1993 New York Times op-ed article, a municipal bond analyst for a major security rating service argued that the cure for New York City’s fiscal problems was to force it into bankruptcy and then to massively privatize …
Eugene Genovese’s essay is an uneasy mixture of expiation and accusation, and so it elicits a mixed response. In challenging American leftists to face up to an overdue reckoning with history and morality, he says some things that badly need …
In his article “Immigration Dilemmas,” Richard Rothstein essentially argues (1) the impracticability of controlling immigration and (2) the economic advantages immigration confers upon American society. He also lists policies that, if adopted, would in time limit immigration. For the American …
Dissent has recently acquired a fax machine—not, to be sure, the very latest model, the cast-off of one of our editors who is “upgrading,” but a new machine for us nonetheless. Will this make us more efficient? Maybe so, and …
You are about to read the account of a wrestling match between Richard Rothstein’s “Immigration Dilemmas” (Dissent, Fall 1993) and me. The struggle began when I came upon the following passage in Rothstein’s essay: American upper-middle-class life is dependent on …
Many conservatives and neoliberals claim that now that Soviet-style communism is extinct, social democracy (or democratic socialism) will soon meet the same fate. Then, of course, they assert that capitalism has triumphed. Are their claims premature, at least as far …
How would I answer “The Question” if it were asked of me? I wasn’t even an embryo when Nikita Khrushchev unveiled Stalin’s reign of terror to the rest of the world, though I was taught about it in excruciating detail …
Concern for the environment is hardly a single mind-set. A look through a few of the many environmental magazines quickly reveals its seemingly infinite permutations and combinations. At one point on the spectrum, we find down-to-earth journals like Garbage, featuring …
In the July 1993 elections, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since its founding in 1955. Japan found itself with a new government composed of a previously unimaginable seven-party …
For more than four decades, the cold war chilled political debate about what women and American families need for their well-being. The family was sacrificed to cold war hysteria and military over-investment. National health programs and child care looked too …
Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992, is widely recognized as the most influential exponent of free-market liberalism in the twentieth century. Although the democratic left is unlikely to find his views very palatable, at least one lesson can be …
