This spring agents of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals staged the largest raid in the ASPCA’s 129-year history. Aided by thirty New York police, a dozen ASPCA agents swooped down on a converted movie theater …
A few years ago, pundits on both sides of the water were pleased to announce the imminent convergence of British and American politics. There were said to be international forces at work too powerful for merely national political cultures to …
As I write, in the summer of 1995, we do not know how many of the measures proposed in the Republican Contract With America will finally become law. But whatever the final legislative result, the Contract With America has already …
The profession that used to be known as sovietology has been torn apart by debates over who failed to predict the collapse of communism, and why. But a greater failure of prediction, by any lights, was Russia’s slide into chaos, …
Leo Ribuffo’s mild rebuke of the left’s typical response to American religiosity (“Religion, Politics, and the Latest Christian Right,” Dissent, Spring 1995)—a response of horrified incomprehension—gets most of it right. But Ribuffo doesn’t address in any depth the sources of …
“It ain’t that hard to understand,” Newt Gingrich said recently, referring to the idea of using “shame” to stamp out undesirable behavior. “Read Himmelfarb’s book. It isn’t that complicated.” Certainly, Gingrich’s summary of The Demoralization of Society could not, as …
Should rights play an important role in feminist theory and practice? The answer to this question is not as simple as it first appears, for contemporary feminism has a profoundly ambiguous relationship to rights. On the one hand, so many …
The welfare state is about security. It is about employment security, income security, and communal stability. It is premised on macro-economic policies designed to mitigate the business cycle and its employment and income effects and to ensure that advancing technologies …
Are we a nation?” The question was raised, in an address of that title, by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the Civil War. At the end of the twentieth century, the question of whether America is a nation has …
As we lurch toward the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to think that our public discourse has gone through a core meltdown. The cold war is over, and we are free from the fear that our leaders …
Some of the disagreement between Peter Laarman and me derives from our different perspectives. I wrote about the latest Christian right from the perspective of a historian who—odd as it may seem these days—was trying for a little detachment. Laarman …
I have been reading in the newspapers that the CIA is in trouble (in the same way, almost, that you and I might be in trouble). With the end of the cold war, it has lost its raison d’être; influential …
Supporters of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) portrayed all these as mere extensions of trade liberalizing initiatives familiar in the …
This is a courageous and painfully honest book that must have been very hard to write. Although it is very well written, it will earn David Rieff few friends. It is extraordinarily difficult to write serious reportage about Bosnia-Herzegovina while …
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the ironies of reaching the academic heights, always sensing his racial distinctiveness, always confronting the hesitant curiosity of sympathetic whites, always coping with their unasked question: “How does it …
