The best thing Jesse Jackson did during the Democratic primary was to name the problems. He was the one Democratic candidate who stressed that there are serious social wrongs in the United States requiring more than superficial treatment. He offered …
Some conservatives believe that when Ronald Reagan leaves office he will take the conservative movement with him into retirement. Kevin Phillips, author of Post-Conservative America, writes, “The tides that began launching the conservative era twenty years ago are old and …
Those of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories of our …
Two questions inform Sandy Levinson’s essay. He asks (a) why we should respect and obey the law, particularly when there is so often a tension between morality and law, and (b) by what authority judges impose their will on the …
Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign marks a historic breakthrough in American politics. It is the first time that a “social democratic” platform has been presented in the mainstream of American politics and attracted significant mass support. The journalistic cliché was, and …
The fortieth anniversary of India’s independence, on August 15, 1987, passed with relatively little fanfare, even in India. There was a small parade in New Delhi; Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi gave a long dull speech lampooned by pundits for its …
What strikes you first, and shocks you, is that no one knows how to work. In the land of the workers, people are at best semiliterate in labor. They work reluctantly, irritably, listlessly. Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow is the gateway …
Much of the contemporary debate about constitutional interpretation is carried on in the language of accountability. Constitutional interpretation is, after all, an “accounting” for a particular result that one views as required by the Constitution. And the overarching debate among …
The late French philosopher is squatting in the corridor. He is gazing, with his one good eye, through a keyhole out at the world. Perched forward, squinting, he is aware solely of the aperture and what he sees through it; …
It was not the speech Martin Luther King planned to give. He wanted his contribution to the March on Washington to be brief, “sort of a Gettysburg Address.” He would, he knew, be following a long list of speakers. A …
Every year since 1911, union members have assembled in front of a building on Washington Place and Greene Street in New York City on March 25. The building is cloaked in black. A fire engine ladder reaches toward the eighth …
October 28, 1963 is an important unacknowledged anniversary for the city of New York. On that day, vandals with a court order began to raze Pennsylvania Station more efficiently than their predecessors did the Roman Baths of Caracalla that inspired …
The disturbances in Kazakhstan in December 1986, the demonstrations by the Crimean Tartars in Moscow and those in the Baltic states in 1987-88, the incidents in Yakutia and Uzbekistan, the increased activity of the Russian “patriotic” association, Pamyat (“Memory”), the …
The sun is barely up when the old man taps on the McDonald’s door. “We’re open in a few minutes, sir,” a young countergirl answers. The old man points to the McDonald’s cap he is carrying. He is the “new …
The most important impact of Jesse Jackson’s campaign has been his ability to fashion for black Americans a parity-status within the Democratic party. A parity-status with regard to a political party is the opposite of a client-status. It entails the …
