In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the vote. In 1994, the Democratic congressional coalition collapsed and the Democrats were swept out of power in the House and the Senate. At that point, many said that …
Last October I climbed to the roof of a decrepit apartment building in Managua’s eastern quarter. Originally a roost of the wealthy during the Somoza regime, it was mangled by the 1972 earthquake that leveled much of Nicaragua’s capital. Today, …
Glen Jeansonne’s investigation of the “America First” mothers’ movement, a massive network of ultraright isolationist women’s organizations that flourished in the Midwest and on both coasts from 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is an informative and often shocking …
The first two Partisan Review anthologies, published in 1946 and 1953 and now out of print, were of an almost unbelievable richness. The contributors whose names began with “A” were Lionel Abel, James Agee, Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, …
Iris Young (“The Complexities of Coalition,” Winter 1997) admits that the left is electorally feeble, but within her framework, it seems to me, she cannot explain the feebleness. Her enthusiasm for the remarkable Jesse Jackson efforts of the eighties may …
Editors: I very much appreciated the symposium on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s critique of a revived progressivism and his hymn to localist democracy (“The Poverty of Progressivism,” Fall 1996). Still, I am concerned that the discussion surrounding the piece so quickly …
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, two Marxist economists, began writing Monopoly Capital in the mid-1950s. After Baran died in 1964, Sweezy put the already revised manuscript into final form, and Monthly Review Press published the work in 1966. …
A stranger smiled at me on Broadway the other day and I smiled back at him. This shouldn’t be unusual, but in New York City it is. What made me reflect on this brief encounter was the ease I now …
The editors’ statement raises three questions. First, should the United States practice an active policy for the defense of human rights abroad? The answer, in my view, is yes. It would be best if such a policy were multilateral, and …
Socialist internationalism was originally based on beliefs that few of us hold anymore: that the workers of the world have no country; that the struggle against oppression is the same everywhere; that, even if there are different national “roads” to …
The academic tendency called cultural studies fiercely disbelieves that there are any unmoved movers at work in history. So proponents of cultural studies should not be taken aback by the view that cultural studies itself can be analyzed as an …
Expecting Bill Clinton to do something about human rights in China is like expecting him to do something about campaign finance reform—what we will actually get is a flood of morally earnest talk followed by more morally earnest talk. At …
Should the word “left” matter any more? Identify with it nowadays and the reaction is apt to be a perplexed, crinkled nose. As if to say, “The word’s in bad odor, why use it? In any event, you’ll be taken …
Someone at Columbia University owes David Denby an honorary degree. As matters now stand, he’s already received a B.A. from Columbia College, where, in 1961, he began his undergraduate career by taking Columbia’s pair of required courses in Western literature …
The early New York intellectuals have written so much about themselves, and so many others have written about them, that it seems superfluous to sketch out who they were, where they came from, and which issues most engaged them. It …
