A specter is haunting the imagination of commentators upon the contemporary scene, the specter of the “new poor.” In days of old (precise time conveniently unspecified), the cliché goes, the immigrant saw poverty as a temporary state and looked forward to …
As I write the slum areas of several dozen large American cities have been ravaged by Negro rioters and by the cops and guardsmen who put them down. For urban Negroes, the pull-back of the poverty program may have been …
“Take over NCNP!” begged a headline in the New Politics News, the convention bulletin of the National Conference for a New Politics, which convened in Chicago on August 30 to create some sort of “organization and action”—possibly a third ticket …
Last May the United States Supreme Court annulled a “marriage.” It ordered the dissolution of a merger between the third and sixth largest supermarket chains in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, reversing a lower court decision, it reinstated the Justice …
Mr. Swan’s distinction between the “order” in our everyday perception and the “disorder” aroused by art is compatible with my own statements. And I agree with him also in believing that literature provides no special sort of knowledge. Our disagreement, …
Robert Heilbroner’s essay, “Counterrevolutionary America,” is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third World.’ Although Heilbroner is an economist, his conclusions rest only to …
It is hard to talk about American intervention these days without talking about Vietnam. Yet Vietnam is not a typical case, in part because the Communists were and are so much stronger there than in any other country where Americans …
Interventionism Again EDITOR: In his comment on discussions concerning the CIA (“Anti-Communism and the CIA,” May–June, 1967), Michael Walzer maintains that if one opposes secret CIA interference in Indian anti-Maoist politics, one must argue that a Maoist victory is either …
This book is a care• fully presented record of one social scientist’s involvement, at the higest level, with governmental planning. The book presents the political context of the Moynihan report, the report itself, the controversies that followed in its wake, …
“He made a mistake” —this confused admission of his followers may herald the end of the de Gaulle myth. The French role in the Middle East crisis last summer not only shocked de Gaulle’s followers; it made them aware there …
The Cold War may be a geopolitical conflict, but it is also, and importantly, religious in tone and intensity. Anne O’Hara McCormick expressed the deep, simple, sincere conviction of millions of Americans when she wrote that “the crux of the …
A major trend seems to be at work in American politics. The consensus of support for the Vietnam War is well an the way to disintegration. For the first time, if the polls can be trusted, a majority of the …
It was a pleasure to read Lawrence W. Hyman’s statement: “It is not a moral direction that we must look for in literature but a disturbance” (“Literature and Political Action,” DISSENT, July—August 1967). Hyman provides an exciting way for handling …
Flying back to Detroit, it dawned on me that in these riotous times you can go home again. I was prepared for lots of deja vu. From chaos to chaos, what’s a twentyfour-year interval? In my home town, where I …
Frank Riessman has been conducting a vendetta against Saul Alinsky for some time: first an article in Transaction and now one in Dissent (“The Myth of Saul Alinsky,” July—August 1967). Riessman’s articles are objectionable because he represents them as scholarship although …
