Some of the contributors to this collection of essays would describe themselves as democratic socialists. Some as liberals. Others as liberal-socialists. And a few perhaps as people of the democratic left who prefer not to be labeled. So be it. …
In July 1987, a group of Afrikaner dissidents met in Dakar, Senegal, with officials of the African National Congress. Among the Afrikaners attending were Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert, former leader of the parliamentary opposition, Beyers Naude, former secretary of the …
Each year more Americans face an uncertain health future with inadequate or no insurance to help pay for medical care. National efforts to control and contain medical expenditures, which are endangering the quality of care, have met with few successes. …
Genesis is the key to understanding. It is in their respective, and widely different, stories of birth and emergence that we find the key to understanding the new courses of Khrushchev and Gorbachev. Khrushchev’s failed attempt at reform grew out …
As we totter on the edge of a recession, Reaganomics, plus the foreign policy that went with it for seven happy-go-lucky years, seems just about totally discredited. So what else is new? Isn’t it obvious to everyone? Well, not quite. …
If anything like a national mood can be discovered in America, then we ought to be facing a moment of harsh sobriety. The party is over; the plates are broken; the debts unpaid. After the Crash. What happened on Bloody …
This should be the Democratic moment. Well before October’s crash, the Reagan administration had shuddered to an overdue halt, its own agenda unenactable and its viable agenda—arms control, last year’s tax reform— lifted without acknowledgement from the center. The much-ballyhooed …
What are the first steps—and then a few beyond—that a newly elected administration should take in 1989? If the Republicans win, the most we can expect is a backing-away from the more extreme versions of Reaganism. But suppose a Democrat, …
In 1926, three years before the Great Crash and a decade before publication of his own grand synthesis, Keynes wrote a prescient essay titled The End of Laissez-Faire. “Some coordinated act of intelligent judgment is required,” he wrote, “as to …
The history of arms control over the past seven years has been an astounding and lurid tale, full of unexpected twists, cynical betrayals, palace maneuverings, popular insurrections, and ironic turns of the dialectic. Through it all has stumbled the extraordinary …
Did Klaus Barbie receive the defense he deserved? Before his trial in Lyon last summer for war crimes fades entirely into history, the question ought to be posed. One imagines that the cynical old Nazi was aware that his acquittal …
If Ruth Messinger were in high school instead of on the New York City Council, she would be considered “the most likely to succeed.” So said a January 1987 Daily News poll. City officials and opinion-makers were asked to rate …
One morning on Broadway I saw a black man approach three young white men. The white men wore business suits; the black man was wrapped in a blanket. As he approached them he put out his hand. But before he …
When Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post in 1976 he launched his new product with a declaration that New York was “a newspaper town again.” The Newspaper Guild, under pressure to grant Murdoch wage and work rule concessions, responded …
When the American Telephone and Telegraph Company announced on March 26th of this year that it would move 1,000 employees from its new Madison Avenue headquarters to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the Koch administration’s fury was tempered only by its …
