FEW SCHOLARS HAVE INFLUENCED our thinking about “extremism” as much as Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of social relations at Harvard. The first writer to apply the concept of a “radical Right” to American social movements (in 1951), he later proposed …
In March 2003, Newsweek pronounced George W. Bush’s presidency the “most resolutely ‘faith based’ in modern times.” This judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration but it is self-evidently true only if modern times began on January 20, 1989, …
Many readers of Dissent may associate mass demonstrations in Washington with liberal or radical gatherings such as the 1963 civil rights march or later protests against U.S. intervention in Indochina and Central America. But political and cultural conservatives have an …
Some of the disagreement between Peter Laarman and me derives from our different perspectives. I wrote about the latest Christian right from the perspective of a historian who—odd as it may seem these days—was trying for a little detachment. Laarman …
According to standard criteria, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the industrialized world—perhaps the most religious country. More than 40 percent of Americans claim to attend religious services each week, compared to 14 percent of …
Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried Oxford University Press, 1990, 229 pp., $22.95 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy described McCarthyism as “Americanism with the gloves off,” but few students of this century’s second red scare …
Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises any contemporary voter remembers. During his 12 years in office, moreover, Democrats and Republicans sorted themselves into the ideological pattern that still …
Contrary to nearly universal expectation, the suit against the State of California’s Board of Education by Kelly Segraves, a fundamentalist foe of evolution, did not turn into a repeat performance of the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. Nevertheless, systematic comparison …
My minimal sense of kinship with the historical profession expands substantially whenever it is glibly attacked by journalists. America Revised provokes unprecedented solidarity with teachers of history at all levels. This lapse from detachment, frankly confessed, has advantages for a …
When President Carter called us onto the “battlefield of energy,” he was only the latest leader to suppose that peacetime problems can be solved by applying the alleged wartime virtues of unity, productivity, and sacrifice. As early as the 1820s, …
Compared to Harvard or Chicago, not to mention Berkeley, Columbia, or Wisconsin, Yale was a remarkably placid campus during the late 1960s. Most students opposed the Vietnam War and felt an amorphous commitment to racial equality but few stood to …
As a former Connecticut resident who voted against Lowell Weicker, I was particularly fascinated by his conduct during the first phase of the Watergate hearings, and by the favorable impression he made among liberal commentators. No one seems to remember …
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