The once conventional wisdom that immigrants, especially the unauthorized, are unlikely candidates for labor organizing has turned out to be not so much wrong as incomplete. It overlooked several factors that make low-wage immigrants more “organizable” in the workplace than …
Courtney Johnson, who has taught English in Ohio high schools for a decade, never expected to make news. In her classes, she routinely stressed the importance of civic participation and political awareness. As adviser to the school newspaper, she emphasized …
Heist: Who Stole the America Dream? a documentary by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, 2012 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, 2010 By now, most leftists and much of mainstream America are …
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Crown Publishers, 2012, 529 pp. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist and economist James A. Robinson have written a book, Why …
F. Scott Fitzgerald once offered some sound advice to those left-wing Americans unsure whether to support Barack Obama’s campaign for re-election. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” observed the novelist, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind …
Mention the Democrats in Congress, and the emotional response of most left-leaning Americans will veer from moderate disappointment to frothing cynicism. Some pols fail to live up to their own hype as zealous reformers, while others seem mainly concerned with …
Editor’s note: this article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Dissent. The online version has been updated and revised in light of recent developments in Egypt. During the first week of 2012, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces …
It now seems like ancient history: the few weeks between Barack Obama’s election in November 2008 and the onset, after the inauguration, of intransigent, increasingly successful Republican opposition to his entire program. That was a moment in which hostility to …
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin Oxford University Press, 2011, 304 pp. Conservatism is idea driven. Its idée fixe is the defense of inequalities of wealth and power against challenges from below—that is …
U.S. universities thought their students understood the deal. They would raise tuition fees, and customers (students) would gamely take out ever-increasing loans to pay for them. Protest about the price of education was reserved for those countries still clinging to …
IS there a path toward a democratic future for China? There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, at least in the near term. But if there is a way forward, then the first steps are being mapped by a …
On my way back from the bakery, which was closing early because of the rally scheduled that afternoon, a car full of women pulled up in front of mine. Like many other vehicles weaving through Karachi’s dusty streets, it was …
Barack Obama’s election marked a significant step in what black Americans call the long road to freedom. A survey conducted after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed that 82 percent of blacks believed they were “unlikely to soon achieve racial equality.” …
Birthright programs that send ethnic youth back to their “motherland” are never simply about roots or where their ancestors came from. Rather, the programs are about giving birth, both in the metaphorical and literal senses, to feelings of connectedness with …
Out to Lunch Editors: I was struck by the Spring issue dedicated to “Food,” where there were seven articles but not one that addressed the subject of food and hunger or poverty. This extraordinary omission, especially for a leading periodical …
