A little over a year ago, at a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels, I heard an American colonel, in quick succession, acclaim the organization’s new dialogue with ex-Warsaw Pact generals, argue for the continuation of NATO funding despite the …
In the national elections held in Italy in late March that ushered in a “Second Republic,” the enfant terrible of Italian politics over the last several years, the Northern League, won only 8.4 percent of the national vote. Yet as …
When people say “welfare” today, they mostly refer to AFDC, the program for single parents and their children. These single parents are mostly mothers, of course, and the current vilification of welfare recipients and their “dependency” is directed primarily at …
I agree with Eugene D. Genovese that the left needs to rethink some of its premises. His polemic is not, however, a useful contribution to this reappraisal. The first article by Genovese I can recall reading was “Dr. Herbert Aptheker’s …
The politics of race and poverty in the United States presents something of a paradox. Throughout the past decade and a half, the nation has been obsessed with the urban minority poor. Fears about the growth of a separate, violent, …
Bill Clinton campaigned for his current job by reminding America what had happened during twelve years of Republican rule. He pointed out that wealth was transferred from the poor to the wealthy; he described an economy sapped of strength by …
I set out recently to read the complete novels of Toni Morrison with a mix of expectation and resentment that was probably unavoidable. What Lawrence called the “mob-self” had heard the tremendous chorus of celebration, crescendoing in the Nobel Prize. …
“Integration: the interval in a neighborhood between the moment the first black family moves in and the last white family moves out.” This bit of folk sociology made the rounds in Chicago during the bloody open occupancy and fair housing …
In a February 1993 New York Times op-ed article, a municipal bond analyst for a major security rating service argued that the cure for New York City’s fiscal problems was to force it into bankruptcy and then to massively privatize …
It is troubling that so many listen to Farrakhan. If no one listens his becomes a voice in the wilderness. But listening transforms monologue into relationship. Farrakhan’s audiences are predominantly black, but blacks are not his only listeners. Jews listen, …
Eugene Genovese’s essay is an uneasy mixture of expiation and accusation, and so it elicits a mixed response. In challenging American leftists to face up to an overdue reckoning with history and morality, he says some things that badly need …
In his article “Immigration Dilemmas,” Richard Rothstein essentially argues (1) the impracticability of controlling immigration and (2) the economic advantages immigration confers upon American society. He also lists policies that, if adopted, would in time limit immigration. For the American …
Dissent has recently acquired a fax machine—not, to be sure, the very latest model, the cast-off of one of our editors who is “upgrading,” but a new machine for us nonetheless. Will this make us more efficient? Maybe so, and …
You are about to read the account of a wrestling match between Richard Rothstein’s “Immigration Dilemmas” (Dissent, Fall 1993) and me. The struggle began when I came upon the following passage in Rothstein’s essay: American upper-middle-class life is dependent on …
Many conservatives and neoliberals claim that now that Soviet-style communism is extinct, social democracy (or democratic socialism) will soon meet the same fate. Then, of course, they assert that capitalism has triumphed. Are their claims premature, at least as far …
