In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less …
A Dubious Normalcy
A well-known political scientist once declared that the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. The simple question—single-payer or not—conceals major differences over whether to frame the health care issue primarily as an economic question or a …
Here’s a secret, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves. But first, you may be wondering who this “we” is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But the problem …
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City by Nathan Glazer Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp., $24.95 Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always …
Nineteen-sixty-eight has become a political myth that won’t go away. The debate on its interpretation continues and continues. The year marks a historical break, comparable to the beginning of the cold war or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Making …
One Sunday morning in December 2007, some three hundred extreme nationalists dressed in black uniforms marched in military formation through a Hungarian village, protesting against what they called “Roma [Gypsy] delinquency.” They then gathered at a rally, where speakers demanded …
[T]he hospitality of southerners is so profuse, that taverns are but poorly supported. A traveler, with the garb and the manners of a gentleman, finds a welcome at every door. A stranger is riding on horseback through Virginia or Carolina. …
It was opposition to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and ’68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in ’67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War …
A blooming industry among pundits, journalists, historians, and others celebrates, although more often deplores, America as “a consumer society.” One prize-winning historian has described the country as “A Consumer’s Republic,” suggesting that consumers own the place. Another argues how consumers …
It’s impossible to look back on the sixties without thinking, What a time that was! Politics and culture intermingled in a heady mix, the personal was political and the political personal; every act—whether demonstrating against the Vietnam War, smoking dope, …
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Metropolitan Books, 2007, 576 pp., $28.00 A strange contradiction afflicts nonhierarchical social movements. Those activists who are most hesitant to create formal mechanisms for naming leaders give the media …
After a period of relative impotence, the Hindu-supremacist right in India has rebounded, with the December reelection of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Narendra Modi as chief minister in Gujarat. Modi’s role in the mass murders of Muslims in that state …
His involvement with Dissent was, so to speak, one of Norman Mailer’s more improbable marriages, and by no means the shortest. A member of the founding editorial board, he was on this journal’s masthead for most of four decades. The …
These last forty years, as each decade grinds to a close, there arrives the anniversary of 1968, with its invitation to nostalgia, the reconsideration of dashed hopes, or a pondering of the paradoxes of frustrated rebellion. Already in 1978 Régis …
