Thoughts on Tear Gas  

Beit Jallah is a lovely but restive town outside of Jerusalem, on the Bethlehem road. On March 21, 1978, students in Beit Jallah assembled to protest the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, begun six days earlier to repay in kind the murderous Palestinian assault upon an Israeli …



From the Walls of Peking  

We print below a section of The Fifth Modernization,  a dazibao  or wall journal, which appeared in Peking several months ago. The English version is taken from a French translation from the Chinese, printed in Esprit,  the independent left magazine that appears …



Memories of the Vietnam War  

Four years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War has become the most important subject in American film. Just why is not clear, but certainly it is a phenomenon that invites suspicion as though, in a period of Jonestown massacres and Gary Gilmore executions, …



The Middle East: What Next?  

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 …





New Changes in China  

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 …



Democratic Opposition in Communist Poland  

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, …





Why the Left Lost the Tax Issue  

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 …



Budgetary Policy and the Crisis of the Welfare State  

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, …



Lifestyle, Then and Now  

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 …



Letters  

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 …





Against the Neoconservatives: The Debris of Ideas  

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 …



1917: Coup or Revolt?  

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 …