JANUARY 1986: See if you can guess the trouble spot for U.S. foreign policy I am describing: A poor country, struggling to industrialize, richly endowed with natural resources but suffering from decades of retrograde political leadership. The United States, in …
With a sigh of relief, the Italian Communist party (PCI) laid to rest the “Soviet Question” in the early 1980s. For more than two decades, the leadership of this massive party (29.9 percent of the vote in the 1983 parliamentary …
With the publication of The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin presents the work on which he wants to be judged and by which he would like to be remembered. The volume contains fifty-one essays, twenty-five of them previously uncollected. …
There’s no return to the point before Solidarity; that can never occur. The idea of ten-year cycles is not correct. There are two important differences: first, the group in power is different from any other that has held power in …
Elliott Currie criticizes conservatives, of which he takes me to be a leading representative, for their views on crime (“Crime and the Conservatives,” Dissent, Fall 1985). Since I have not yet seen Mr. Currie’s book, I do not know what …
On the subject of totalitarian states, it has been said that the most reliable writers essentially pertain to two categories: those who live outside and are not allowed in—and those who live inside and are not allowed out. In recent …
Aside from the request at Passport Control that I remove my cap to confirm that I was the bald man in the picture, entering Warsaw was uneventful. I was waved through after having had to buy zlotys at the official …
From the beginning, the New York Hospital Workers—Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU)—projected an exceptional image among American labor unions. Its first strike for recognition in May 1959 came at a time when many longtime …
In response to a segment on the homeless, a TV anchorperson recently quipped, “Well, that’s the price of progress!” Those who had tuned in to this Reaganite one-liner (an ideological relative to the old Stalinist quip, “You can’t make an …
Based on impressions gathered from the media in the course of the past year, the canyons of Lower Manhattan, in the vicinity of the Wall Street Corral, have been reverberating with the sounds of shoot-outs as a puzzled public tries …
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world: Were we to divide today’s Gross National Product equally among families of four, each would have roughly $65,000. Self-evidently, a much more equitable distribution of resources than …
In the Reaganite war for “privatization” of American society, the latest target is education. A bill before Congress puts forward a voucher proposal called TEACH, The Equity and Choice Act of 1985. This bill comes out of difficulties in pushing …
Few things hold us like home. The current celebration of traditional family values expresses a need for refuge, pleasure, and acceptance that is as impossible to forgo as it is difficult to satisfy. If nostalgia for the past is largely …
In the United States, the relationship between socialists—often economic and cultural outsiders—and a more “American” working class has generally been problematic. For much of this century, however, Britain has provided an alluring counterexample. The British Labour party seemed to have …
Anyone who returns to Nicaragua after a two-year absence—as I recently did—must be struck by a marked deterioration in every facet of life in that country. Two years ago, despite the increasing cost of fighting a war on both borders, …
