In the midst of bloodshed it is hard to keep in mind that in cases of prolonged conflict, peace is achieved, more often than not, after violent convulsions. So it was with the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the peace …
Noam Cohen makes several very good points about the possibilities of social change occurring from the technological revolution of the Internet. Before we on the left embrace the Internet as a cure-all for the woes of modern consumerism and alienation, …
A few things are finally clear about the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999. First, Seattle is the international benchmark by which protests against corporately managed global trade are now judged. From Davos, Switzerland, to …
If a presidential election indicates the health of the body politic, America’s civic condition may be hovering just this side of the intensive-care ward. Even by the low standard we’ve come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest …
On January 31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, California, was fielding calls from worried patients. The clinic is nestled near …
The graffito made famous by American GIs as a marker of place, of having been somewhere, stands rewritten as the name for a travel agency on Zellescher Weg in Dresden: “Kilroy Travels.” This phrase, printed in English over a stylized …
Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s bedazzling secretary of state, emphasized the importance in his Senate confirmation hearings of tightening ties between trade and national security. There is a need, he asserted, for better coordination of American foreign economic and military …
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2000, 544 pp. Tucked away on a shelf in my parents’ home is a trophy honoring their achievements in the Knights of Pythias bowling …
America is a secular society nervous with its secularism. Since the nation’s founding, that nervousness has manifest itself in periodic redrawing of the boundary between church and state and in practices that compromise the “wall of separation.” Today, however, the …
C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings ed. Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, introduction by Dan Wakefield University of California Press, 2000, 378 pp., $34.95 In the nineteen fifties and early sixties, C. Wright Mills cut a wide swath …
Global trade advocates hope that the new information technologies (ITs) will deliver immense benefits, especially for those who control these technologies. But as potent as they may be as profit-seeking tools, information technologies are (at least for the time being) …
“When the legend becomes fact,” says Edmond O’Brien in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “print the legend.” The process of printing the legend about the 2000 presidential election has now been well under way for some time; …
We devote this issue almost entirely to American politics, looking back to the disputed presidential election and forward to the administration of Bush II. The mix of articles is incomplete; we can’t cover everything at once. But the pieces add …
The California power crisis has made it clear to all but the most theory-besotted ideologues that “trusting the market” does not automatically solve economic problems. This comes as news to few readers of Dissent, but what went wrong is worth …
America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers Basic Books, 2000, 232 pp., $27 The basic premise of Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers’s America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still …
