Fall 2025

Neither H. Brand nor Joanne Barkan finds much to dispute in my analysis of the forces that drive immigration, the impossibility of fully consistent positions in response to calls for its restriction, or the desirability of progressive social policies to …

From the mid-1960s to 1980, the piazzas belonged to the left in Italy. So did the bookstores, since dominant culture—criticism, political science, philosophy, the arts—leaned heavily to the left. Conservatives despaired: Oh, when would Italy become a normal West European …

There is good reason to fear that “postmodern” and “postindustrial” currents of thought will sweep away the foundations of existing radical critiques without offering anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well to criticize social democracy, the …

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 …