Elshtain and Etzioni respond to my ar-gument for minors’ First Amendment rights with the same highly charged rhetorical devices that have brought our culture to its current state of hysteria over the need to “protect” youth from presumably harmful speech. …
The recent publication of two biographies of Betty Friedan, and the media attention the books have drawn, make this an apt moment to reflect on the myths about the women’s movement that some on the political left as well as …
I met Joe Wood in 1992, after mutual friends suggested that I might ask him to write for Dissent. I remember liking him immediately. He was an interesting mix: he was blunt, almost fierce, in his opinions, yet in his …
“How do you feel?” roared Jerry Greenfield, CEO and co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company that has (in the public imagination, at least) long epitomized corporate social responsibility. He posed this question a few years ago to …
Marjorie Heins has written an intelligent but predictable polemic in favor of “free expression” for those she variously calls “youngsters,” (this excludes “little ones” though how little we are not told), “older minors” and, of course, “teenagers” though her argument …
Joe Wood had a voice as deep as a doublebass, and he spoke as he wrote: low, slowly, softly. He forced you to listen attentively to each of his words, pausing gravely as if to prepare you for the next …
If ever there were an opportunity for progressives to seize control of the policy agenda, if ever Beltway rhetoric seemed ready-made for co-optation by the liberal left, the Social Security crisis is it. Social Security is an immensely popular program, …
I have never been a disinterested observer of Central and East European politics. I grew up in Hungary and lived there until I was almost fifty. In only two of those years was there a political order that resembled democracy. …
If the left hopes to remain vital, it needs to attract young people. To do this, it must take stock of the political and cultural experiences of the younger generation. Today, that means the world of what has been called …
At the close of the century, many people believe that liberalism or neoconservatism has emerged triumphant. The evidence for this view is considerable. During the past two decades, in many of the developed democracies the state has been in retreat …
Last summer, J. Brian Atwood, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the government agency responsible for foreign aid, announced he was stepping down. Freed from the Clinton administration’s Panglossian view of the world, he delivered a …
This year The Second Sex turns fifty. Now deep into my own middle age, I reread the book in the wake of thirty years of thought and feeling much influenced by its steady presence among us and I find, turning …
The fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet bloc initiated a sweeping transformation of world politics. How should we think about these momentous events and their implicatons a decade later? Dissent asked a group of European and American …
President Clinton wants to use federal budget surpluses to “save Social Security first.” It’s politically inspired gobbledygook. Informed Americans now understand that Social Security is “pay as you go,” but most take this to mean that current payroll taxes provide …
In 1990 I spoke at a Chicago teach-in about the possibility that something genuinely new and emancipatory might emerge from the wreck of Soviet communism. I explained that the democratic deficits and economic failures of that social system in no …
