The two appear to have nothing in common but an appearance on David Letterman’s The Late Show. Relaxed, smoking a cigar, and toying with the host, she broke the record for vulgarity on network television. Smiling nervously and awkwardly swinging …
I begin with a straightforward proposition that there have been three types of black political leadership in twentieth century America: (1) pragmatic activist, (2) systemic-radical, and (3) ethno-radical. The first of these refers to what we commonly think of as …
The history of modem society, from one point of view,” Christopher Lasch observed in Haven in a Heartless World, “is the assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals and their families.” This, at any rate, is the …
Economists have begun using the term “winner-take-all economics” to describe the fact that the salaries of investment bankers, software designers, and basketball players continue to rise while the wages of photocopy attendants and paramedics stagnate or fall toward the official …
Should we, half a century later, reconsider the morality of Hiroshima? “No,” will retort apostles of what may be called “Patriotic Correctness.” (I borrow the phrase from Robert Hughes.) For these PCers, self-questioning is always tantamount to anti-Americanism. But a …
What does it mean to be a feminist scholar today? To get a sense of the shape of contemporary feminist research, I looked at the last three years of Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, …
There was a time when trade unionists despaired of finding justice in the American courts. Consider the landmark cases: In re Debs (1894), handing federal judges unlimited power to restrain labor activity by means of injunctions; Loewe v. Lawlor (1908), …
It is by now a truism that television has usurped many of the traditional roles of political parties; more than that, it sometimes seems to have all but devoured the political process. Power flows to politicians and journalists who exploit …
What are women to do in today’s political climate? More specifically, what should the organizations that represent them in Washington do for the next two years? In my view, the task for the women’s movement is clear. The task is …
The publication schedule of Dissent doesn’t fit neatly with the political schedule of American democracy — so we were not able to “cover” the electoral disaster of November ’94. But the role of a quarterly is, in any case, to …
According to standard criteria, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the industrialized world—perhaps the most religious country. More than 40 percent of Americans claim to attend religious services each week, compared to 14 percent of …
The problem is, the problem isn’t just Bill Clinton. Fault the president for his timing and tactics on health care, for subordinating his investment agenda to deficit-reduction mania. But it was hardly Clinton’s doing that Kathleen Brown changed identities every …
Democratic Culture is the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), an organization of somewhat under two thousand left academics, primarily from the fields of English and the humanities. Published three times a year, it consists of articles, excerpts …
Irving Howe opened A Margin of Hope, his autobiography, by recalling a conversation in which Ignazio Silone asked him when he first became a socialist. “At the advanced age of fourteen,” was Howe’s reply. That would have been 1934, a …
The European Community (EC), the United States, and the United Nations have all contributed mightily to the death of Yugoslavia and the murder of Bosnia. German and Austrian overeagerness to recognize unilateral declarations of secession by Slovenia and Croatia assured …
