Multinational countries live in a state of permanent trouble, all the more so if economic anxiety makes solidarity an issue and ideologues and politicians dream of cultural homogeneity. Federalism has proved to be the most viable way to satisfy both …
After Ella Fitzgerald died last June, I picked out a few CDs, played them over and over, and became happier and happier at what I heard (except in the case of a horrible album with Andre Previn on piano, and …
In August, President Bill Clinton signed a bill that ended the sixty-year-old program for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). To be sure, this was not an entirely new development. Since the 1960s, when the welfare rolls expanded, Republican …
For many alumni of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the Citadel, the last two state-supported schools that hoped to continue their pattern of discrimination against women, the Civil War has been lost again. The suit by the Department of …
When Jeffrey Isaac calls for chastened political expectations, I can’t help but agree. Given the political blockages and intellectual disarray of the moment, who wouldn’t? As I write this, in early July, the New York Times reports that federal cutbacks …
This issue of Dissent is focused on American politics, a natural theme for the season and the year. But we are not concerned here with how to vote in the presidential election, which doesn’t seem a difficult (though it may …
“I’m trying to be optimistic,” an Israeli friend said to me after last spring’s elections, “but my son goes into the Army next year and I shiver when I think of Netanyahu making life and death decisions for this country.” …
It’s not just suspense that’s missing from this year’s elections. It’s hope. Oh, there’s plenty of hope that the Democrats will win—holding the White House, retaking the Hill, wresting control of the national agenda from Newt and Trent and Bob. …
E.M. Forster introduces his Aspects of the Novel by proposing that “we are to visualize the English novelists. . . as seated together in a room, a circular room. . . all writing their novels simultaneously.” Likewise, Joseph Schwartz summons …
The death of Michael Harrington in 1989 marked a melancholy turning point in the history of twentieth-century American socialism. Not since Eugene Debs made his initial run as the Socialist candidate for president of the United States in 1900 had …
American democracy is at a watershed. The so-called “social contract” governing American politics since 1945 has broken down. Although the talk of a “Republican Revolution” is surely hyperbolic, the conservative Republican agenda has significant political momentum, and it seeks to …
In the midst of the Great Depression the American public was treated to a sudden outpouring of revelations about the horrors of the South’s most notorious penal institution, the chain gang. Even today, many people know the Warner Brothers 1932 …
Perhaps rail transportation should be treated as a public good and subsidized by the state. But the hard truth is that Amtrak subsidies are going down and will soon disappear. On September 21, 1995, the House Transportation Committee approved a …
Midway through his extraordinarily rich biography of Walter Reuther, Nelson Lichtenstein writes about an episode that occurred in 1947 while Republican Congress was passing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) called for protest demonstrations. Reuther, in …
JUNE 1996. TURIN, ITALY: After a seventeen-year absence, no surprise that I had forgotten how lovely much of this city is: deep porticos running up and down the boulevards, giving shade to posh cafés and shops; baroque palazzi whose carved …
