For the first time in 16 years, Boston has a new mayor, former South Boston State Representative and City Councilor Ray Flynn, and he has become a cynosure of hope for many. Flynn’s record, however, is not such as to …
My experience of dissent is extremely individual, even though, like any personal experience, it reflects in some way broader, more general, and more ramified developments, and not only the events of my own life. I have never belonged to any …
It might be illuminating for someone in the stands at a big-league baseball game to ask youthful white fans, randomly, “Did you know that until 1947 black players were not allowed on big-league teams?” I suspect at least half would …
Unemployment averaged 7.1 percent in 1977, declined in the next two years to 6.1 and 5.8 percent, and jumped upward again in 1980 to 1977’s 7.1. For January 1981, the month the Carter administration departed, the statisticians registered a figure …
Haitians are so far down on their luck that if a world prize existed for the most hapless people, they would be edged out on a technicality by perhaps the Chads or Bangladeshis. Haiti, for most of its population, is …
Pursuing a halt to the arms race is like unraveling a ball of snarled string. Half a dozen promising strands hang loose. You take up first one, then another, untwisting, disentangling—will this be the thread that finally releases the whole …
One striking image haunts the memory of those who witnessed the military coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende in September 1973: the bombing of the Presidential Palace and its futile defense by a handful of aides and Allende himself. So …
“Strong democracy” is an approach to politics that emphasizes participation and community. It reflects a conviction that representative institutions have done as much to undermine as to undergird democratic practice, and that our problem today is that we have too …
I am grateful to the editors of Dissent for the opportunity to reply to Deborah Meier’s article, “‘Getting Tough’ in the Schools: A Conservative Prescription,” reviewing my book, The Troubled Crusade, in the Winter 1984 Dissent. I hesitate to call …
In 1983 Ronald Reagan did as president what he had never been able to do as an actor—he had a significant impact on the movie industry. Not that the president got the Reagan equivalent of PT-109 produced or that his …
“Knee-jerk liberalism”—a term not heard much these days—was once used by conservatives to deride the supposed automatic nature of liberal responses to social and political issues. Conservatives conveniently forgot that one function of any set of beliefs is to create …
In spite of endless analyses and premature obituaries, the subject of the American family continues to draw on a seemingly bottomless well of feelings. Barbara Ehrenreich’s witty and original account of contemporary antifamily attitudes and Brigitte and Peter Berger’s measured …
The deployment of new missiles in Europe has occasioned severe differences of opinion within the European socialist community as well as among other Europeans. Such differences, of course, also exist on this side of the Atlantic. Below we print two …
A heated public debate in Israel, lasting from May 1980 until the outbreak of the Lebanese War in June 1982, followed Yehoshafat Harkabi’s attack on Shimon Bar Kochba, the second-century leader of the anti-Roman revolt in Judea, 132-35 C.E. (of …
In the film Silkwood, there is a scene with particular meaning for our times. It comes after Karen Silkwood has been exposed to radiation at her job and to a new consciousness by her union. She has become motivated to …
