By the time he was 45 years old, the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky had survived a dizzying succession of political systems: Masaryk’s democratic republic, the Nazi protectorate, the postwar social democratic republic, Stalinist rule after the 1948 coup, the humanist …
“There’s no point in being a moderate in Texas,” State Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has remarked, “’cause the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” It helps to keep that observation in mind …
This is the story of a gifted and effective trade unionist who finds himself president of America’s most battered major industrial union. The story raises the perennial question of how much difference one leader can make when historical forces are …
For the future of the Democratic party, the 18-percentage-point defeat of Walter F. Mondale in the last election was far less important than the decisive failure of the party’s basic strategy: voter mobilization. Both the Mondale campaign and the Democratic …
Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 is a fierce polemic about the failure of Great Society liberalism to improve the lot of America’s poor. Murray’s argument comes in three parts. In the first part he contends that precisely …
With few exceptions—among them Robert Kuttner, whose book I here applaud—everyone who has been taught that remarkable mixture of cognitive crippling and liberating illumination called economic theory “knows” that equality and efficiency are at odds with each other. No society, …
Fifty years ago next July, Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act, then better known as the Wagner Act after its chief sponsor, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York. The act was termed “Labor’s bill of rights,” and indeed …
Whether or not the idea ever had any validity, no one could argue plausibly after November 6 that labor is the leader or vanguard of the people. But this much can be said: AFL–CIO members gave the Mondale–Ferraro ticket a …
In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union implemented agreements limiting antiballistic missile defense and intercontinental ballistic missiles. That year, the U.S. had roughly 5,700 strategic nuclear warheads, 1,054 ICBMs, 656 SLCMs, and 463 strategic bombers. The Soviet Union had …
When Bernhard Goetz was approached on a New York subway by four young black men demanding $5, he drew a revolver and fired all its dum-dum bullets at them. Two were hit in the back; one remains paralyzed and comatose …
The American physician has been portrayed, in turn, as snake-oil healer, charlatan, kindly old country doctor, and venerated high priest of the art of healing. Now, in a brutally changing world where vast corporations assume new power, he may be forced …
Given two diametrically opposed projections of our economic and political future, what should the response of the left be? I pose the issue in this uncertain way for a reason. The United States and the other advanced industrial economies are …
In 1932 R. H. Tawney published an article in which he reflected upon the events of the previous year: the collapse of the Labour government and the massive electoral defeat of the Labour party in which it lost 235 seats, …
I: From Criticism to Terrorism Around 1960 a series of civic upheavals began that made the West tremble. Contrary to the predictions of Marxism, the crisis was not an economic one, nor was its central protagonist the proletariat. It was …
Long before the election took place in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration dismissed it as “sham” and “Soviet style.” After the election took place on November 4, 1984, President Reagan pronounced it a “farce.” To anyone familiar with the kind of …
