Spring 2024

In transportation, as in so many areas, the Obama administration is playing catch-up. But few other fields of policy offer such opportunities for innovation. Changing circumstances make attainable what once was visionary. And transportation’s unusual status in today’s polarized politics, …

Who named the neoconservatives? You are looking at the perpetrator, or so it is believed. Dissent and its circle, in the early 1970s, invented the term to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest. The …

Newly elected Senator Jon Tester, reports the New York Times, is “your grandfather’s Democrat—a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.” Virginia’s new …

Put a conservative in the driver’s seat, and he can sound like a utopian Marxist. If you ask him about food, housing, or health care, he’ll explain how buying it and selling it in the marketplace creates the best of …

Why won’t the Democrats learn from Kansas?

The politics of George W. Bush, unlike earlier American conservatisms, is animated by ideas and not merely by interests. That is, at least, what Bush’s friends assert, and what his foes usually concede. But is it so? The ideas in …

The New McGovernites

A certain kind of leftist just can’t help blaming American imperialism for September 11. In the search for “root causes,” their instinct to designate the United States as villain overwhelms their spirit of critical inquiry. Overlooking the perpetrators’ frank expressions …

The California power crisis has made it clear to all but the most theory-besotted ideologues that “trusting the market” does not automatically solve economic problems. This comes as news to few readers of Dissent, but what went wrong is worth …

The neighbors of Our Lady of Mercy church were aghast. The archdiocese wanted to build an assisted-living home for thirty senior citizens on the church’s eleven-acre property in an expensive Washington, D.C., suburb. The aggrieved residents quickly collected money to …

Perhaps the most interesting economic thinking of recent years has come out of the effort to understand the collapse of communism. And the implications of this thinking are far removed from the simplistic market worship that so many, in East …

One of the classic pitfalls in setting policies for the social use of technology is the search for a “technical fix”—a resolution of social and political contradictions through the introduction of new technology. The technical fix represents an attempt to …