Recent discussions about the plight of African Americans—especially those at the bottom of the social ladder—tend to divide into two camps. On the one hand, there are those who highlight the structural constraints on the life chances of black people. …
Anyone who thinks that the collapse of the Soviet and East European regimes discredited Marxism and socialism is-to put it charitably-having an off day. As Alasdair MacIntyre, no sympathizer, once observed: “The barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns …
Over the last decade poor young adults in rural areas have not been finding enough work to support themselves. Federal social programs are an important buffer: food stamps, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Head Start, and job …
Historians of women were confronted with an unusual dilemma a few years ago, when their work became the object of impassioned debate in an unlikely forum: the courtroom. In 1984, defending itself against an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit …
Sunday morning in the capital city of a midwestern state. Four people sit at a table in the corner of a deserted hotel ballroom, sipping dreadful coffee and eating scrambled eggs and sweet rolls. They are there because the SENATOR …
During the last thirty years the perspective on the African-American urban experience has changed dramatically. Gone, to a large extent, is an interpretive model that stressed the social pathology of black life. Attributed, in its nonracist forms, to the destructive …
The “common people,” Walt Whitman observed in 1871, are too often “degraded, humiliated, made of no account.” American democracy must uplift “the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very …
Remember when the university was called an “ivory tower”? Bookish college presidents? Absentminded professors? Befuddled students? These types belong to a distant, perhaps mythic, past. Today no one charges that college presidents are too scholarly, that professors wander about in …
“The guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia,” Harry Angstrom, the aging hero of John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest observes. Rabbit’s observation is shrewd, but as the 1990s—with an …
To say that we are losing the war on crime is a cruel understatement. Today we are a nation reeling from rates of violent crime that in many places outstrip anything we have seen before in our history. The basic …
Christopher Lasch’s earliest books were about radical intellectuals in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and the movements of the left they supported. Lasch was critical of these movements and their intellectual allies for failing to maintain a consistent and realistic …
In the last half of the 1980s questions began to be raised about income and wages in the U.S. economy. Who was benefiting from Reaganomics? Was the economy producing a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs? Was the middle class shrinking? …
The possible arrival of a new social class evokes grand blasts of imagery. Across history’s bookish stage roll bourgeois Christian soldiers, boxcars of workers (trailing haunting specters), limos carrying commissars of the nomenklatura, electricians in white coats (breathing soul into …
Who among us would insist that our children repeat the miseries—real or imagined—of our childhoods? Why, then, do we tolerate other people’s children suffering more than most of us will ever do in a lifetime? The answers lie in a …
Thomas Roberts, Camden, New Jersey’s affable director of economic redevelopment, used to be optimistic about bringing his moribund waterfront city back to life. “But then I saw Roger & Me,” he says, “and I realized it would not be an …
