Fall 2025

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 …

How would I answer “The Question” if it were asked of me? I wasn’t even an embryo when Nikita Khrushchev unveiled Stalin’s reign of terror to the rest of the world, though I was taught about it in excruciating detail …

Concern for the environment is hardly a single mind-set. A look through a few of the many environmental magazines quickly reveals its seemingly infinite permutations and combinations. At one point on the spectrum, we find down-to-earth journals like Garbage, featuring …

In the July 1993 elections, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since its founding in 1955. Japan found itself with a new government composed of a previously unimaginable seven-party …

For more than four decades, the cold war chilled political debate about what women and American families need for their well-being. The family was sacrificed to cold war hysteria and military over-investment. National health programs and child care looked too …

Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992, is widely recognized as the most influential exponent of free-market liberalism in the twentieth century. Although the democratic left is unlikely to find his views very palatable, at least one lesson can be …

Labor’s recent, unsuccessful campaign against the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) tapped a deep well of rank-and-file anger and frustration. For nearly twenty years now, trade unionists and other working people have borne the brunt of an industrial restructuring accompanied …

Recently, I attended a conference on race and medicine. As part of his presentation, one of the participants showed a slide of an invitation for a social event that had been sent out by an Indiana medical society. The theme …

QUESTION: When does “universal” mean “all but 3.2 million”? ANSWER: When it describes the actual coverage of U.S. residents for benefits under President Clinton’s health reform proposal. The language of the Health Security Act is clear: the estimated 3.2 million …

The conflict between liberal democratic capitalism and state socialism dominated political life for most of this century. Now the political arena is changing radically. The problem is whether we can develop political ideas to make sense of those changes and …

Like most New Yorkers I know, I regularly give to panhandlers. How much depends on how much change I have in my pocket, but my rule of thumb is a twenty-five-cent minimum. If West Side Cares, a new food-for-voucher program …

On November 2, 1993, Rudolph Giuliani defeated David Dinkins to become New York City’s third Republican mayor in this century. Although the 1993 election closely paralleled the 1989 race between the two, small shifts in turnout and preference produced a …

Beritan was a seventeen-year-old Kurdish girl with a wide grin and a big gun. It wasn’t the gun that worried me so much as the grenades—two strapped to a cartridge belt around her waist. I had visions of an accidental …