There is something unseemly about the in- variably gloomy analyses of the problems that now confront the Middle East, in the wake of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. The treaty was in itself so remarkable an achievement, and so unexpected, that …
Has the French Communist party truly changed? If so, to what extent and in what direction? Some evolution is suggested by the line adopted by the Union of the Left, by modifications in the Party’s language, and by the distance it has put between itself …
There is at least one highly desirable result of the new turn in China—the “new Chinese man” has suddenly disappeared. He must be communing somewhere with the “new Soviet man” who took somewhat longer making an exit from the stage …
Poland lately is visible in world affairs. Every morning the American President listens to his Polish-born adviser on national security; the Prime Minister of a much smaller country, who first arrived in Palestine as an NCO in the Polish army, …
To listen to some of our doomsters who write on the American labor movement, it is in a bad fix; if not quite at death’s door, its condition is critical. Even serious journalists such as A. H. Raskin hold these …
If there is any issue that exemplifies the rightward drift in American politics, it is the issue of taxes. Those of us with political memories that extend past June 6, 1978 will recall that the issue used to belong to …
The federal budget for the fiscal year 1980 proposes a socially regressive shift in national priorities. It uses fiscal policy to engender higher levels of unemployment. It shifts the burden of fighting inflation to those least able to bear it, …
I recently learned of the existence of the Lifestyle Market. I had sensed it was there, of course, but not as so formalized an entity. What the Lifestyle Market is, according to “Lifestyle Notebook,” a supplement to a recent issue …
Author’s Reply Editors Robert Lekachman’s review of my The Bard of Savagert: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Fall 1978) manages to combine intellectual distortion with moral complacency. Perhaps it is wise not to reply to reviews, bad or good, but when one finds …
It is a little too easy to take the speeches and proclamations of African leaders for gospel truth. When somewhere, in one of those old colonial cities lost in the African bush, a political party all of a sudden declares …
American conservatism has not been, by and large, intellectually very precise. Lionel Trilling’s judgment in 1950?which every conservative writer or anthologist seems dutybound at some time to mention in rebuttal? remains apt: “with some isolated and ecclesiastical exceptions” conservative impulses …
The great virtue of Harrison Salisbury’s most recent book, his eighth on Russian subjects in a lifetime of thinking and writing about the Soviet Union, is its high literary quality. Black Night, White Snow is a voluminous, compelling narrative that …
In the early 1960s, American political leaders were looking for a panacea, a quick, easy solution for the embarrassing, even dangerous, problems of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and explosive political alienation. Head Start was the perfect cure. It was relatively noncontroversial, …
When the New School for Social Research presented Ted Katsaros at its labor-management luncheon last December, it was recognizing, somewhat belatedly, the union reformer. Just 20 years ago, the same luncheon series featured A.J. Hayes’s, then president of the Machinists …
One of the more perplexing aspects of neoconservatism is its apparent belief that America is in the grip of implacable egalitarianism. Nathan Glazer gloomily contemplates the “awesome potency” of “the revolution of equality … the most powerful social force in …
