On April 7, just two months after the formation of a coalition government that includes members of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), Alfred Gusenbauer, newly designated chief of the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ), a former youth leader not known …
On January 14, 1991, when the first Iraqi scuds hit Israel, one of the central commitments of the kibbutz—that children are best educated among their peers in the communal children’s house—shattered within a few hours. Parents swooped up their children …
Crabcakes by James Alan McPherson Simon & Schuster, 1998, 288 pp., $13 Pulitzer-Prize winner James Alan McPherson has written two highly regarded collections of short fiction, and the pleasures and insights offered by Crabcakes are those of a well-crafted story. …
Arnold Kaufman’s The Radical Liberal was originally published as an entire issue of Dissent and then released as a book by Atherton Press in 1968. Read today, it smacks of its time. One of America’s most divisive presidential elections is …
Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens are playing leading roles in the British debate on globalization and the “third way.” This fall, their jointly edited book Global Capitalism will be published in the United States by the New Press. It begins …
Ordinarily, when a writer responds to a review, he discusses what is said in it. As Chomsky can’t be bothered, for those who missed what I wrote, I will summarize it in a few sentences. I said that Chomsky dismisses …
The governor of California charges that an industry-backed proposal to deregulate toxic waste disposal would put the polluters in charge of the pollution control setup. The director of the state health department adds that the plan would create “a backlog …
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi William Morrow & Co., 1999, 662 pp., $27.50 Are American men in crisis, entrapped in a consumer culture without the opportunity to pursue meaningful work, and in psychic despair, searching …
Aryeh Neier’s outrage over a “diatribe against NATO’s military intervention” (“Inconvenient Facts,” Dissent, Spring 2000) is understandable: the issues are too serious for that. His essay is presented as a review of my book The New Military Humanism (NMH), which …
In 1998, Congress passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act. The law will keep Internet purchases virtually tax free until October 2001. It also created an Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce. The commission is made up of eight representatives from state …
Not since Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982 has Russia had such a prospect of political stability. Vladimir Putin’s election to the presidency this past spring consummated the first voluntary transfer of power—instead of by death or a coup—in the entire …
Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st Century by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison Century Foundation, 2000, 345 pp., $25 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison are two icons that progressive economists of my generation looked to …
A competent polemicist, David Goodhart has produced a slick diatribe against left critics of the third way in general and, in particular, my annotation of the Blair-Schroeder manifesto. He’s also reproduced in his writing the defects of the politics he’s …
The governing systems of the world economy have failed—in their missions and in their propaganda. Protests in Seattle, at Davos, and lately in Washington have crystallized the spirit of resentment, aimed at tiny elites with great power. Michel Camdessus, managing …
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust by John B. Judis Pantheon, 2000, 305 pp., $26 John Judis has written a valuable book of the kind that rarely interests commercial publishers anymore. It …
