I am writing more than a month before the New Jersey Democratic primary, in which I shall not vote for Jesse Jackson. That would hardly be a fact worth mentioning except that large segments of the American left (including the …
In 1968 I wrote an essay entitled “Le Désordre nouveau”*— it was written hurriedly, in the heat of the events. There is a passion in it that may seem surprising today. But at least I gave no credence to expectations …
We know about Stalin’s and Hitler’s great crimes, the sycophantic Red monarchy of Kim Il Sung, and the bloody purges of the former French lycée teacher of Tirana, Enver Hoxha. More attention should be paid to another European example of …
I suggest that we think of the modern welfare state as a system of nationalized distribution. Certain key social goods have been taken out of private control or out of exclusive private control and are now provided by law to …
It may be a truism to say that a clash between two broad and diametrically opposed visions of society underlies virtually all democratic political debate. Yet these polar world views are seldom explored systematically; few thinkers, in this polemical and …
A few years back, acknowledging its losses in membership and power, the AFL-CIO launched a fairly serious critique of its policies and operations. If it did not come up with a lot of terrific answers, it did ask a lot …
Cuzcatlán, the title of Manlio Argueta’s new novel, is the old Indian name for El Salvador. In our own United States literature, names like that used to crop up often a century and a half ago: “Hiawatha,” “Chingachgook.” Unscrupulous poets …
Armed soldiers were not in evidence. At the airport it looked like business as usual. I was in Haiti as one of two observers sent by the Americas Watch Committee, which had set up an office in Port-au-Prince with the …
I can think of at least two ways to approach history. There is the historian’s way, usually celebrated as realism, and…the “unhistorical” way, claiming for itself, in the name of an undogmatic moralism, nothing less than truth. The historian’s way …
Asked two years ago whether the Teamsters would rejoin the AFL-CIO, President Lane Kirkland said: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley.” Kirkland had good reason to be skeptical, for the AFL-CIO had expelled the Teamsters in 1957, …
Like Americans, Canadians will be going to the polls later this year. When they do, chances are that the biggest issue on their minds will be a treaty with the U.S. that most Americans have never heard of. Maybe they …
The air snapped and crackled. December weather. The white Christmas mini lights were already lit in New York. It was a funny day, this eighth of December. Overnight one had got accustomed to the American flag and the hammer and …
Money is not the only gauge of political vitality, but in the case of both the Republican and Democratic parties, money reflects the general stagnation of partisan competition as the Reagan years come to a close. For the Republican National …
The obligatory allusions to the 1960s in press reports about the national student convention held at Rutgers University the first weekend in February were as disappointing as they were relevant. Newsday in particular ran a photograph of a barefoot activist …
I an isolated “holler” in northern Tennessee, Marie Cirillo, an ex-nun, has lived and worked with local people for twenty years. The rivers of the area are polluted by runoff from coal mines, and the people seem irrevocably poor. This …
