I write these thoughts on Dissent’s future with a copy of the Spring 1956 issue lying next to my typewriter—part of a fairly complete collection that I cherish immensely. The Spring 1956 issue contains articles that cut across the gamut …
It’s hard to imagine how Port-au-Prince could be a worse place than the city I visited last March, but eight months later reports say that the bodies are turning up in greater numbers than at any time since the September …
Midway through Norman Rush’s award- winning novel Mating, a renowned leftist sociologist named Nelson Denoon rails against those who turn socialism into “an orientation or aesthetic or feeling.” For Denoon socialism is about “concrete institutional propositions that could be shown …
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 …
