One of the signs of left internationalist commitment is a strong interest in the politics of otherpeople’s countries. For many years, internationalism required a steady focus on the Soviet Union.Other countries lived in the shade. But Russia today looks more …
The walk from my home on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill down to my studio at its bottom is a lesson in class and status in America. As each few blocks take me down another rung on the socioeconomic …
Ségolène Royal’s candidacy last spring was without precedent in French politics. For the first time, a woman was the presidential nominee of a major party and thus had a chance of being elected. There were several other women candidates running …
Paris: Last year an American socialist on a long stay in France ambled almost daily past the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters of Paris’s fourth arrondissement. He thought to stop in. “What are local Socialist politics like?” he wondered. After all, …
Few of us will forget November 2004. I remember driving myself to the point of pneumonia, having spent the previous two months making “persuasion” calls to my fellow Ohioans during the evenings and doing weekend “lit drops” in tiny rural …
George W. Bush became president in part because people thought he was his father. This isn’t to say that people voted for the younger Bush because they expected he would continue the “kinder, gentler” conservatism the elder Bush had once …
What narrative best characterizes the history of American families? Should their story be read nostalgically, as one of decline from an era when two-parent families with children dominated the domestic landscape but as one of relative stability over time or …
Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account by Larry May
My book What’s Left? is about deceit and the rich world’s left, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the most deceitful piece to be written about it in any journal in any country should appear in a magazine …
The New Labour “project” is often regarded outside of Britain as a successful example of how social democracy can be modernized. “The progressive consensus” is what the country’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, calls it. Tony Blair, his predecessor, often …
Nick Cohen’s is perplexing, characterized as it is by daft hyperbole (I’m Maoist now?), denial of his own statements, and arguments that he knows I agree with and have done more to advance than he. It’s disappointing he doesn’t try …
The French President after his May election. Photo: Guillaume Paumier This past spring, French President Nicolas Sarkozy won 53 percent of the votes. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen, Philippe Askenazy, Françoise Gaspard, Nancy L. Green, and Jean-Baptiste Soufron consider how the …
Spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it. Living with it is the magic power that converts the negative into being. —Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807 My city’s …
Internet and new digital technologies played remarkable, novel roles in the 2007 French presidential campaign. They produced unexpected shifts in daily operations of parties, which had to reverse their tactics as a result of information flows and the need to …
Attempting to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” over the space of a short essay might be considered an enterprise worth avoiding. The chances of falling flat on your face or coming up empty-handed, of not having …
