Sovietologists who always thought that deep Russian cultural traits were a major factor shaping Soviet communism found Gorbachev’s perestroika and the rapid progress toward constitutional government under his leadership a perplexing innovation, though a welcome one. Now we know, unfortunately, …
This essay focuses on the basic design of the Clinton administration’s health-care-reform policy. It examines how the president’s early decision in favor of employment-based private insurance rather than tax-based social insurance led to an unnecessarily complex program. While recognizing that …
In my Upper West Side neighborhood in New York, the latest in-spot is a bookstore. That a bookstore should have such drawing power says much about my neighbors. But it also says much about the bookstore—a new Barnes & Noble …
Back in the days when the sound Of the various different drummers Pounded out for all corners The same unchanging command, To march against Whatever Or to go limp and be Dragged off in the piety Of some general palaver
Tom Nairn’s provocative article (Fall 1993, “All Bosnians Now?”) deserves a fuller reply than I can provide in a brief rejoinder. Nevertheless, a few notes might be appropriate. Nairn is right. “Balkanites” are irritated when the historical divide between Byzantium …
Two-year-old Rhys Daniels suffers from a rare genetic disorder that leads to blindness and dementia. He hit the headlines when he was denied life-saving treatment earlier this year because of the closure of a bone-marrow transplant unit at a London …
When Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown for having a baby without a husband in May 1992, most liberals and leftists recognized it for the ploy it was: a Republican attempt to win an election by an irrational appeal to “tradition” …
Stephen Carter is dismayed that liberal culture doesn’t take religion seriously. His complaint has hit a nerve. Peter Steinfels, the religion editor of the New York Times, praised Carter’s “well-honed arguments” in his Saturday column. Bill Clinton read the book …
The question poses a choice between “radical hope,” which sounds grand, and “piecemeal” pleading for a “little more” democracy, which sounds piddling. Who would oppose “radical hope,” given such an alternative? From a realistic point of view, radical hope can, …
We are stuck in the midst of the most feeble economic recovery since World War II. Gross domestic product (GDP) is currently growing at an annual rate of 2.4 percent, well below the 4.9 percent average for postwar recoveries. The …
We live in a therapeutic society that trivializes trauma. Every day, ordinary people confess their secrets to Oprah, Phil, and Geraldo. In every bookstore, shelves groan under the weight of self-help books that promise freedom from pain. Women who love …
This is the law: The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, its leaders and its members, are responsible for the way our land was governed in the years 1948-1989 and in particular for the systematic destruction of the traditional values of European …
Now that the suffocating mortgage of communism has finally been lifted, opportunities for the democratic and socialist left in both East and West may have a second chance. Yet, by a curious twist of the zeitgeist many of our friends …
By the late 1950s all West European socialist and social democratic parties (I shall use the terms interchangeably) had abandoned in practice, and some in theory too, the idea of socialism as an “end-state” or “final goal.” What had been …
Being an intellectual at the end of the twentieth century means you won’t get rich, and your ideas, if you have ideas of your own, will be generally ignored. But you will get lots of chances to travel. On one …
