I should like to argue with Norman Thomas who, I will assume, is present in absentia. As Irving Howe said earlier, in Norman Thomas’s later years, this celebrated socialist leader concluded that his career had been a failure. So I say …
Reagan’s reelection by a landslide fully conformed to the well-established precedent that incumbent presidents win new terms when relative peace abroad and prosperity at home prevail. Of 13 incumbents before him who ran for election in this century, only four …
In Civil Wars, Rosellen Brown has created a remarkable personal view of the long-term effect of the 1960s civil rights movement on two of its participants. Teddy Carll, a native Mississippian, and Jessie Singer, a “red-diaper baby” from New York, meet …
Suppose that all of New York City’s black middle-and working-class housing developments were plagued by crime and management neglect. Then a recent court settlement upholding “occupancy controls” in Brooklyn’s Starrett City, the country’s largest federally subsidized housing development, might make …
It was an exercise in ’60s nostalgia. “Our time has come!” he shouted from the pulpits of black churches and the campaign stump. “Our time has come!” It was a cry reminiscent of the “Freedom Now” chant of the early civil rights movement, one …
For a while it seemed as if it would take less than a decade to put Vietnam behind us. It was not just that we had finally signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam, but that debate over the war had ceased to be …
television is never in itself decisive. I learned this in 1972, when New York’s most notorious TV operative confided to me how he would make John Lindsay president. In ’84, the two debates showed Ronald Reagan as a man whose touch with reality is tenuous. …
This town belongs to Roberto Suazo Cordova, the president of Honduras. The streets of La Paz are paved, though people in neighboring towns put up with rocks and ruts in dry weather and mud in the rainy season. The Suazo …
Smuggle a thousand rifles, submachine guns, and grenade launchers into the 20 largest American cities, distribute them among known criminals, excops, the hard core of left- and right-wing lunatic sects, and assure a continuous supply of ammunition and tactical intelligence, leaving …
Popular culture is sometimes far ahead of academic analysis in identifying important social currents. This is true of the hit song Every Breath You Take, sung by a celebrated rock group known as The Police. It contains these lines:
The recent, “third” wave of emigres from the Soviet Union has produced a wealth of valuable memoirs and works of fiction. But, except for a handful of economists, it has been singularly barren of significant contributions to our understanding of …
Thomas Sowell is a very good storyteller. But The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective is a poor book. It has the same strengths and weaknesses as the other three of his books I have read (Essays and …
President Reagan won a smashing victory. Yet despite the magnitude of the Republican triumph the Democratic party was not reduced to smithereens, even though, in some places, only small pieces of it remain, especially in the South and the West. …
Of postmortems there will be no end. What follows is less ambitious, a mere personal response written three days after the election. • It was a severe defeat. There are a few consoling features, most of all the failure of …
For a period of ten years, since the collapse of the “power-sharing” Executive under the impact of the Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974, the problems of Northern Ireland have seemed virtually insoluble. Political opinion in the two communities in the North …
