Spring 2025

Civic Nationalism and the Left

WHAT WAS THIS? I’d been invited to some Washington think tank for a May Day symposium on socialism, which also seemed to be a reunion of the old Shachtman-Meany-Kirkland Social Democrats USA. What strange error had led the planners to …

Hackers never were part of the mainstream establishment, but their current reputation as villains of cyberspace is a far cry from the early days when, first and foremost, they were seen as ardent if quirky programmers, capable of near-miraculous, unorthodox …

How long has it been since we heard that old catchphrase “late capitalism”? The collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the rush of the leftovers of “real existing socialism” to find a place in the global market economy, give that …

Asked by the German periodical Die Zeit in August 1989 whether the opening of a MacDonald’s franchise in Moscow signified “the end of Communism,” Daniel Bell wrote the following reply.—Eds. To answer the question posed by Die Zeit directly would …

I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals-social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy-and the unending struggle to put their laudable, …

Union Perspective on the War on Terrorism

“An immature outlook on life”

Slowly, an intelligent opposition to the Bush administration’s domestic and foreign policies is taking shape. Not only from leftists: some thoughtful conservatives have begun to worry out loud about the ideological stridency and rigidity of their own leaders. There was …

I argued in my Dissent essay that the campus antiwar left is moralistic and politically irresponsible. Steger asserts that my tone is one of “haughty confidence” and claims that I caricature the pacifism of the campus left and idealize “realist …

The great simplifiers are hard at work, but Israel/Palestine has never been a friendly environment for them, and it is especially unfriendly today. They are bound to get it wrong, morally and politically, and that is a very bad thing …

Reply to Jeffrey C. Isaac

Because al-Qaeda’s ideology is rooted in an extreme version of Islam, post-September 11 discourse has focused mostly on ways that Islam may, in certain circumstances, give rise to bin Laden-like phenomena. This sort of approach is both facile and wrong, …