Fall 2025

The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib

Speaking to the Working Class

Republican Strategy to Elect Jeb Bush

I begin with a passage from a 1954 essay of Irving Howe’s, reprinted in the recent Fifty Years of Dissent volume, called, premonitorily enough, “The Problem of U.S. Power”: The central fact [he writes] is that we continue to live …

November 2004: The election is over. The red states have prevailed. And a “values debate” has begun, as has a debate about the debate. Were values really a crucial factor in the Bush majority? And if so, what was at …

An Indian Epic Awry

Sometimes where and when you first read a book matters. In graduate school while I was studying American intellectual history, my adviser, Christopher Lasch, suggested I crack open Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Vital Center. As a young leftist, it …

Agony in Darfur

An examination of the underground economy in Cuba

As this issue of Dissent goes to press in late November, almost everyone from the center-left outward remains in various states of shock, disbelief, and depression about the election results. This series on rethinking the cultural war over the family …

The elections presage troubling times in American life. The Republicans certainly triumphed. But their claim to a “mandate” for a zealous agenda is, if unsurprising, reckless-especially in wartime. They are bad winners when they prevail, but no less than when …

The Unionization of Nontenure-Track Faculty

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the European-along with the much weaker American-left has been in a crisis that has challenged its very identity. In fact, this profound crisis predated the events of 1989; it was in full swing …

That George W. Bush’s administration would pose a danger to basic liberties was clear as soon as we saw the brown-shirt methods and state action to disenfranchise voters in Florida and the selection of John Ashcroft as attorney general. Subsequent …

“People like me have to save liberals from themselves.” -Michael Moore Strange things happen when the world of entertainment crashes into politics. Remember those “Rock the Vote” scandals a few years back? Big celebrities like Madonna and Jewel sermonized to …