Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal …
The mantra of the current Israeli government that Jerusalem is “the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people” does nothing to resolve the stalemate over the city’s status. Nor does saying these words make Jerusalem truly undivided. The truth is …
Bad faith, indeed! George Packer’s opening sentences in the New York Times Magazine article he published as the Iraq invasion loomed read, “If you’re a liberal, why haven’t you joined the antiwar movement? More to the point, why is there …
After I’ve walked the dog, checked and rechecked that I have my lecture notes and student critiques ready for the 10:00 a.m. class I teach at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I sit at my desk with my second mug of …
With a steep recession in full swing, it’s French-bashing time again on the editorial pages and in the business sections of American newspapers. As the Obama administration frantically weighed policy options, pundits agonized over the prospect of the U.S. government’s …
The infusion of money into highways through gasoline taxes and the suburban exodus of the middle class and their adoption of the automobile as the primary mode of transportation profoundly altered the nation’s landscape over the past fifty years. The …
Jim Rule has written a wonderfully bracing but also a strangely high-minded critique of United States foreign policy. By “high-minded” I mean first of all abstracted from all the difficult decisions of past and present policy making. And I mean, …
At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the ticket agents behind the glass that separates the world of employees and rules from the public at large, you may be asked, “Where are you trying to …
Fifteen years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the …
I want to focus on the question of patriotism. If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first? If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers …
Jim Rule’s reference to me is hard to parse, because the language is vague, but he’s essentially saying that anyone who now warns against a swift and complete withdrawal from Iraq must be trying to justify an earlier decision to …
For seventy years the disparate “Left” supported, belittled, glamorized, ignored, or attacked Saul Alinsky and his tradition of community organizing. Today, it should embrace community organizing, participate in it, and play the role that non-sectarian left organizers do in the …
The year 2006 pushed me into electoral politics. Not only did right-wing Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public agenda, but in my very blue home state of Maryland, too many establishment …
The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some …
I came out to my mother in a letter. I was twenty-eight. “I was born this way,” I wrote, following with the most shattering high note of self-loathing I can think of: “If there were a straight pill,” I lamented, …
