The bottom line of Michael Kazin’s potpourri of political hunches, reportage, and prescription (“Alternative Politics,” Winter 1996) is that progressives should support Democrats in 1996—hardly an item of controversy among this or other readers of Dissent. Kazin’s broader argument is …
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 …
In 1993 Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to head the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. Guinier was experienced in civil rights litigation and politics and was also a family friend. …
Unemployment is not only an economic issue; it is also a political one. No government can afford to ignore it. A flourishing economy and ample jobs give governments legitimacy. They lose legitimacy if the economy stagnates and good jobs become …
Populism is all the rage in this political season—an enraged and often outrageous populism. Judging from the last election, American voters have hit the boiling point. They hate taxes, big government, and spending on the poor. They hate the Washington …
When they passed legislation mandating their own compliance with federal labor laws in the first hundred days of the congressional term, Republican leaders already knew that in the next hundred they would begin the systematic dismantling of federal labor law. …
After a time of sickness and suffering, Irving Howe, in the year before his death, regained an animating interest in life. For a while, free of the grim paraphernalia of doctoring and hospitals, he gained shelter. His spirits revived, and …
In the 1960s and 1970s, Eugene Genovese revolutionized historical writing about the Old South. Using a supple form of Marxian analysis, he ended the reign of the “consensus” historians, who had viewed white southerners as guilt ridden liberals driven by …
In the debate over the Mexican bailout last January, U.S. stockbrokers, the Mexico lobby, and the mainstream media pressed hard for the rescue package. Their argument rested on the premise that economics had replaced military action as the basis for …
In a world where you are asleep with your fathers, in that part of the forest where trees read, your tree still reads to us. Tonight your branches bend over Conrad, Trotsky, Saba, the evergreen Irish. Joyce hated flowers, his …
Here is a book that is easier to praise and to agree with than to review and to criticize. Its main theme is simple, right, and rather mysteriously neglected on all sides: the “culture wars” have been an enormous diversion …
When candidate Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” that statement essentially summed up the current state of poverty politics. In recent years, it has become politically advantageous to promise to end welfare. On the other hand, …
In all the discussion of sending the children of welfare mothers to orphanages, it seems to have escaped attention that an immoral use of the English language is involved. An orphan has never meant anything but a child whose parents …
Cuban affairs drew many headlines in 1994. Spring marked the beginning of a headlong cascade of events: a bungled attempt by the Havana regime to stage a dialogue with moderate exiles in April, a mass exodus of Cuban balseros (rafters) …
I do not see why Steven Lukes thinks that the left’s “pursuit of a commitment [to fighting injustice] . . . can be recognized only because it has advanced successive but distinctive visions or theories of justice and of the …
