The emerging code word is “big-spending liberal.” Voters are sick of government waste, weary of politicians who solve problems by throwing money at them, and bloodied in their hides by vicious tax bites. Liberals, it is being said, are the …
John Ford in Grapes of Wrath, Martin Ritt in The Molhv Maguires, Hal Ashby in Bound for Glory have all shown that the union movement can be powerful material for the screen. Yet we do not have in this country …
The 95th Congress has been a disaster for American liberalism. A partial listing of progressive measures that failed to survive the Capitol Hill obstacle course would include any type of welfare reform, tax reform, labor reform, or national health insurance; …
For over 40 years, ever since Marquis Childs wrote that best-selling book, Sweden has been known as the land of the Middle Way, which was slowly but consistently moving from a backward state toward its present position as the most …
0ne evening last year I waited on a downtown Moscow street corner to meet a friend. It was after 9:00 P.M. and a bitter November wind made me take refuge behind a huge canvas portrait of Lenin, erected for the …
Liberalism Editors: In the Summer 1978 issue Harry Boyte (“Beyond Liberalism: Toward a Living Democracy”) wrote of the “antidemocratic assumptions” and “authoritarian traits” of liberalism. Would he document those statements from the writings of authentic liberals like John Stuart Mill, …
Howard Jarvis stumps the country preaching salvation through lower taxes. One of the country’s best congressmen, Don Fraser, loses to a millionaire convert to the same gospel, and Vice President Mondale travels to his home state to urge his fellow …
The choice confronting California voters in November’s gubernatorial election was between Jarvis hip and Jarvis square. Both unconventional Jerry Brown and bland Evelle Younger, the Republican challenger, ran a campaign of cutbacks each proclaiming his commitment to a constitutional “spending …
Of course, it’s impossible to pinpoint the beginning of Dissent. Probably the idea of a new magazine was mentioned first in early 1953; the first issue is dated January I, 1954. (I recall vividly the moment when the first copy came from the printer.) It …
It’s almost like completing a circle. Dissent marks its 25th Anniversary with an issue featuring articles on the swing to the right in American politics and intellectual life. When we started in 1954, we were polemicizing against a similar trend. …
The Vietnam war was beyond doubt the most demanding test of American foreign policy and its makers since the Second World War. The war in Vietnam was not just another crisis in 30 years of successive crises; it was by …
Few historical judgments appear so unassailable as the almost universal condemnation of the harassment inflicted on Americans accused of Communist sympathies barely a quarter of a century ago. Only a few isolated sectarians on the far right today revere the …
Israeli Jews assume diplomacy to be less the art of the possible than the ritual forestalling of disaster. This is, I suppose, a subtle distinction. Still, it helps to account for Israelis’ earnest celebration of the Camp David agreement despite …
The man whose memory we honor here was 62 years old when he was murdered. He was the same age as Aldo Moro. A coincidence, of course. A more curious coincidence is that both men were kidnapped as they were …
Various euphemisms have attached to the events in the Soviet Union that began in early 1928 and culminated in the frenzy of Stalin’s revolution from above at the end of 1929. Some of these characterizations are scholarly; others, frankly political. …
