What keeps us going? Max Weber’s famous definition of politics as “the slow grinding of hard wood” seems to apply especially to us, the men and women of the Left. For the powerful and the rich, and for the demagogues …
In recent months, a number of official announcements from inside Cuba have led to speculation that meaningful political change could be underway. From a declaration that it will release a number of political prisoners to an apology for past repression …
In the text of my article “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” readers can find the sources for any material that I have quoted. For those who would like to see general sources, background material, or suggestions for further …
Underwater drilling is a tricky business. And on April 20, 2010, as British Petroleum was closing up a well it had drilled beneath the Gulf of Mexico to explore for oil, the company’s luck ran out. At the depths where …
My father moved out the summer before I began middle school, just before I turned twelve. The first months of separation were marked by his efforts to reach out to my two sisters and me. He came to all our …
I am the seventeenth or eighteenth, possibly even the nineteenth, child of my father. But who’s counting? Certainly, he’s not. I don’t know much about his relationships with all his children—in fact, I don’t even know all my siblings—so I …
“THE YOUNG are honorable and see the problems,” Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, “but they don’t know anything because we have not taught them anything.” Michael Brown’s wise and eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young know quite a lot, …
Adding a bit of jest to Hegel, Marx quipped that if history repeats itself, it does so first as tragedy then as farce. Even by this standard, it is not clear how we should characterize Pakistan’s third overthrow of military …
Since 2004, the sixty-two-foot statue of Jesus erected by the Solid Rock Church has stood as one of the most conspicuous landmarks in southern Ohio, located at the midpoint of the fifty-mile corridor of suburban sprawl along I-75 between Cincinnati …
Two and a half years after the recession started, Wall Street executives are once again collecting billions in bonuses, businesses are flush with cash, but most of America is still hurting. After a growth spurt at the end of last …
You lose an election with your second worst performance ever, and 20,000 people join the party in the aftermath. Then the leadership contenders—all but one prominent ministers in the last government—compete with each other to distance themselves from that government’s …
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Louis Menand W.W. Norton, 2010 Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha C. Nussbaum Princeton University Press, 2010 IN 1922, Austrian art …
We hear a lot today about federalism, the doctrine that emphasizes the rights and powers of the states versus those of the federal government. The political Right expresses alarm at the dramatic expansion in central government power that began under …
We are currently enduring one of America’s periodic freak-outs about immigration. State legislators rush to enact laws allowing police to grill anyone they suspect of lacking the right documents, leading Republicans advocate repealing the “birthright” section of the Fourteenth Amendment, …
We are surprised by Mark Engler’s criticism of our essay, “Democracy Undermined,” in the Summer 2010 issue of Dissent, in which we lament the heavy-handed use of the law to dismantle democracy in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, purportedly to build …
