Welfare is the most despised public institution in America. Public education is the most iconic. To associate them with each other will strike most Americans as bizarre, even offensive. The link would be less surprising to nineteenth-century reformers for whom …
My object is to defend Barack Obama against attacks on him by what has been his liberal constituency. Again and again he is accused of timidity and excessive caution for not fighting for their agenda. The assumption is that his …
Although much ink has been spilled on the contemporary economic crisis, one question remains puzzling: what happened to the European Left? Capitalism is in crisis; greed, irresponsible behavior, neoliberal ideology, and unrestrained markets are seen as largely to blame, and …
Sometime this summer, if all goes well, the United States will disengage its combat troops from Iraq—and next summer from Afghanistan. In the Dissent/Penn Press book Getting Out, a number of our writers look at historical examples of imperial and …
Jesse Larner sounds a shrill alarm in his broadside against hate crime laws (“Hate Crime/Thought Crime,” Spring 2010), raising a variety of seemingly dire libertarian, First Amendment, and slippery-slope arguments. Yet, despite the fact that federal and state hate crime …
In the field of performance art, Marina Abramović is a legend, and her recently concluded six-week show, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has been a turning point in giving performance …
Early in the morning of June 28, 2009, the president of Honduras, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was rousted out of his bed by soldiers and sent out of the country in his pajamas. It was an old-fashioned coup d’état, evoking, seemingly, …
The idea of the nation-state is in a grip of two pictures: first, the nation as an extended family; and second, its territory as home. The nation as an extended family is a metaphor for an ethnic nation, whereas a …
Michael Foot, who died on March 3, 2010, at the age of ninety-six, was the soul of the democratic Left in England. His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and …
Against the background of Barack Obama’s attempt to defend the idea of “two states for two peoples” in Israel/Palestine, consider a recent talk given by the Palestinian Sufian Abu-Zayda. Abu-Zayda is fifty years old. He was born in the Jabalya …
The New Old Europe by Perry Anderson Verso, 2009, 548pp., $39.95 When the history of the present era is written, it will be interesting to see which institutions, ideologies, and reputations survive the Great Recession of 2008. Some casualties are …
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 496 pp., $29.95 Rescuing Justice and Equality by G.A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2008, 448pp., $47.50 Contemporary political philosophy starts from John Rawls’s theory of justice. …
Death by Gender Editors: I am more than a little perturbed at the headlining of my article “Death By Gender” on the cover of the Spring Dissent. “Honor killings” as a category is not a “feminist” issue (which many readers …
Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country. It seems a good time for such a discussion. Both U.S. …
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan St. Martin’s Press, 2009, 272 pp., $24.99 Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save America’s Wilderness by Dean Kuipers Bloomsbury, …
