In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An American Drama, wherein they lovingly explore every weakness of that villainous …
In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An American Drama, wherein they lovingly explore every weakness of that villainous …
It is no longer clear whether winning or losing elections is the bigger disaster facing socialists. The British Labour party lost to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand’s French Socialist party won unprecedented power, and neither is in especially good shape. When …
Bitburg, Germany, 1945; Managua, Nicaragua, 1985. The two appear to be so far apart that no occurrence could possibly bring them together. But in March and April, 1985, Ronald Reagan asked himself a question, Whom shall I honor? And his …
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s essay “Politics and the Battered Woman” [Dissent, Winter 1985] not only seriously misrepresents my book Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, but it is a good example of an all …
One evening in March 1983, after giving her three-year-old daughter a birthday party, a New Bedford, Massachusetts woman left her two children with their father and walked to a neighborhood bar to buy cigarettes. According to her story, she bought …
They had a merry Christmas in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For the first time in three years, the holiday passed without a steel mill being shut down. The unemployment rate was about 14 percent, nearly double the national average but well below …
“Modern capitalism,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” Over 60 years ago, R. H. Tawney, who cited those lines from the …
The long-legged, high-kicking beauties in Mel Brooks’s The Producers look like any other chorus line of dancers but for a single exception: they are suited out in the black uniforms of the SS. The dance they perform, backed by a …
When the Selma crisis began, 20 years ago this spring, the country was ready for it. Before Selma there had been the Woolworth sit-ins, the freedom rides, and in 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project. By the time Selma began, the …
Among all the uncertainties of current politics in America, one event—I think—is certain. In the elections of 1986 the Democrats will score a victory: they will increase their majority in the House of Representatives and will capture the Senate. The …
We have lost a dear friend. Muriel Gardiner was a distinguished psychoanalyst, author of several valuable books on psychological and social themes, and the wife of Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian socialist movement during the 1930s and, for …
Where once reporters’ books on Russia suffered rejection or were relegated to remainder shelves if published, detente, however brief, launched a flood of books about Russia by reporters. There is, obviously, a market for them. No resident correspondent in Moscow …
Georg Lukacs wanted to write his autobiography shortly before he died in 1971, but his health wouldn’t permit it. Instead, he jotted an autobiographical sketch and gave a long interview to a couple of his students. One of them, Istvan …
The nation’s military might is never more impressive than when the Pentagon is battling against those who criticize its efforts to rid the defense budget of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. Though the budget is widely conceded to be riddled with …
