The purpose of this new magazine is suggested by its name. . . . The accent of Dissent will be radical. Its tradition will be the tradition of democratic socialism. We shall try to reassert the libertarian values of the …
From the beginning, Dissent has been a haven for utopian ideas. An early essay by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser declared that socialism was “the name of our desire,” paraphrasing what Tolstoy had written about God. In 1954 it was …
When you’re celebrating your sixtieth birthday, there is a natural impulse to gaze back fondly at what you did well. For a magazine that has always been described as “little,” Dissent has aspired to contain multitudes. In our pages (and, …
Blacks In and Out of the Left by Michael C. Dawson Harvard University Press, 2013, 256 pp. Contemporary African-American scholars across the humanities and social sciences share a preoccupation with posing big questions about the dilemmas of black life in …
Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State By Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein Oxford, 2012, 320 pp. Caring for America—part feminist critique of the welfare state, part labor history, part organizing case study—is the …
Upon being elected mayor of New York City with nearly 75 percent of the vote, Bill de Blasio began his victory speech with words to gladden the heart of just about anyone who has ever written for Dissent: “Tackling inequality …
Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s by Michael Stewart Foley Hill and Wang, 2013, 432 pp. Are the 1970s and 1980s really history? Over the past ten years, the era has undergone …
Marshall was a good friend over many years—almost half a century; he was a political comrade for all those years; and he was a lovely human being. My wife, Judy, and I knew him first as a very vulnerable young …
If the twentieth century was the age of fear, the twenty-first is the age of shame. This is the most succinct way to describe how the dominant form of repression has changed. The twentieth cen-tury was full of terrible events …
Do you remember the proverbial “herd of independent minds”? That was critic Harold Rosenberg’s description, decades ago, of the New York intellectuals. These days some packs are still (alas!) on the left, some on the right, and some run somewhere …
If tomorrow the GOP agreed to everything in the agenda that Barack Obama laid out in his February State of the Union address, the progress in dealing with the dramatic changes in the economic prospects of most Americans would be close to zero.
Ravel Gonçalves Mendonça is a 17-year-old beach volleyball phenom from Rio. He is currently training with Brazil’s national team at its state-of-the-art facility. But his country’s preparation for the Olympics has eliminated what used to be Ravel’s home.
As our television screens toggle between pundits squabbling over Obamacare’s insurance rules and ads for erectile dysfunction remedies, another health care battle rages in village clinics and corporate boardrooms. Multinational brands and technocrats are concocting supranational policies to hold poor patients hostage to pharmaceutical markets across the Global South through elaborate intellectual property schemes in international trade.
In the Fall 2013 issue, Hans Kundnani wrote about the German Social Democrats’ struggle to challenge Angela Merkel’s approach to the Eurozone crisis. Read his update on the new grand coalition here, and read the original article here.
Once there was a golden age of democratic capitalism. Chastened by the Great Depression and cowed by vigorous labor movements, a generation of leaders forged a new type of political economy in the aftermath of the Second World War that united economic growth with robust welfare regimes. Then in the 1970s something went wrong. At least, that is how the story goes.
