Spring 2025

Tocqueville is a writer of immense emotional power, and the secret of that power lies in the poetic rhythms of his prose; and, in the whole of Democracy in America, no chapter offers a clearer or more vivid demonstration of …

The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in …

This past November, the Cuban poet and journalist Raúl Rivero made what I believe was his first public appearance in New York City. Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban state—the Moscow correspondent during the 1970s for …

Susan Sontag, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over …

A friend leaned across a bar and said, “You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people …

What were my expectations for Eastern and Central Europe ten years ago? I did have my hopes. They were vast. I was hoping, a little wistfully, to see a new kind of society arise—a society with socialist values and libertarian …

Did Bill Clinton’s impeachment crisis represent a continuation of the culture wars from the nineteen sixties? My three-part answer is: it did; did not; and vice versa. To wit: (1) The impeachment did represent a continuation of the old culture …

Radical Son by David Horowitz Free Press, 1997 468 pp $27.50 A good many readers of Dissent subscribe to the New Republic, and those readers will thrill at the opportunity to discover anew the following letter-to-the-editor, which ran in the …

Has the American culture that could once generate an Edmund Wilson become incapable of generating anyone similar today? Has something fundamental changed in American life, and is the age of critics-in-general (and readers-in-general) behind us? The idea that some such …