In today’s politics of the family, the right has claimed the high ground. They’re the ones laying down the law on “family values.” Come to think of it, they’re the ones who concocted that tendentious term and slipped it into …
Jeff Isaac believes contemporary progressives face serious new problems of program and agency: identifying “what is to be done” to advance egalitarian democratic values under present economic and social conditions, and finding someone to do it. Sharing these values with …
Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of the shocking. In cities across the land, Dykes on Bikes, looking for all the world like Hell’s Angels, roar by on souped-up Harleys. Elaborate floats carry …
George Fredrickson is one of this country’s most prolific and influential historians of race relations and racial thought. His earliest book in this area, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971), …
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 …
