Minnesota was long known as a progressive stronghold, from its support for Ignatius Donnelly and the Populists of the 1890s and A.C. Townley and his Nonpartisan League in the First World War era to its election of Farmer-Labor governors, senators, …
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Random House, 2010, 272 pp., $25 AFTER THE fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses …
An old conservative-minded contention goes something like this: if you start with an egalitarian ethos, you will bottom out at complete leveling. It’s a slippery slope to the end of individuality. This was not simply a social or economic claim. …
When I became director of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was surprised to find that it lacked a multidisciplinary course that aimed to provide a coherent interpretation of contemporary urban America. What …
Danny Rubinstein’s account, in his Summer 2010 Dissent article (“One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine”), of the disdainful reaction of Sufyan Abu-Zayda, a prominent figure in the Palestinian Authority, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Bar-Ilan speech,” in which the right-wing prime …
In the not-so-distant past, when Norberto Bobbio, the Italian political theorist, first asked this question, it was (or so it looks today) relatively easy to answer. There were only two choices: the version of socialism that prevailed in what we …
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo 1977, 346 pp. Bombingham by Anthony Grooms 2001, 320 pp. Dispatches by Michael Herr 1968, 260 pp. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson 2007, 702 pp. War Story Jim Morris 1979, 342 pp. …
When bank robber Willie Sutton was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” he reportedly responded, “Because that’s where the money is.” Progressives should keep this insight in mind.
Theatre by David Mamet Faber and Faber, 2010, 157 pp., $22 Here is a fact beyond dispute: David Mamet is the most visible and widely respected American playwright of the last quarter-century. His acid-tongued dramas of the 1980s, which zeroed …
When Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, swept the Academy Awards, it was a signal triumph for a plucky independent movie on a grave topical subject. Directed by a woman and made in Jordan without the …
Michael Lieberman insists that hate crime laws do not criminalize speech or thought. Let’s examine this position first, as much flows from it. As Lieberman points out (and as I noted in my article), U.S. hate crime laws indeed require …
Today, because of the crisis, the relevance of socialism can and must be addressed not simply as a desirable long-term goal but as a question of practical policy, focused on securing jobs, benefits, and social provision. After giving some examples …
A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010, 386pp., $30 Concerning E.M. Forster by Frank Kermode Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009, 170pp., $24 In 1953, when the first issue of …
Do some artists—authors, painters, composers—have an uncanny capacity to jell a political moment and anticipate the next in their own media? It’s an old, admittedly romantic question, and it crossed my mind as I watched Patrice Chéreau’s treatment of Leoš …
In the still unfolding national debate about the economy, everything opposed by the extreme Right and the Republican Congressional caucus (the two can hardly be separated) is labeled as socialism. Repeal the Bush tax cuts? Obama wants to redistribute wealth. …
