The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen AK Press, 2012, 818 pp. Eric Laursen has written a highly readable, exhaustively researched history of the last thirty years of struggles over Social Security. His …
The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 272 pp. In September 2010, a full year before protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, Timothy Noah wrote …
Social movements can be very grand. Years ago, Richard Rorty wrote an article in Dissent describing Christianity and Marxism as prototypical social movements (“Movements and Campaigns,” Winter 1995)—they aimed to transform the world and to create “new” men and women. …
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett Yale University Press, 2012, 336 pp. Richard Sennett’s new book was already in press when the Occupy movement took to the streets last fall. But its title alone suggests …
The Short American Century: A Postmortem Edited by Andrew Bacevich Harvard University Press, 2012, 287 pp. The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by the superiority in applying organized …
The once conventional wisdom that immigrants, especially the unauthorized, are unlikely candidates for labor organizing has turned out to be not so much wrong as incomplete. It overlooked several factors that make low-wage immigrants more “organizable” in the workplace than …
Courtney Johnson, who has taught English in Ohio high schools for a decade, never expected to make news. In her classes, she routinely stressed the importance of civic participation and political awareness. As adviser to the school newspaper, she emphasized …
Heist: Who Stole the America Dream? a documentary by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, 2012 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, 2010 By now, most leftists and much of mainstream America are …
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Crown Publishers, 2012, 529 pp. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist and economist James A. Robinson have written a book, Why …
F. Scott Fitzgerald once offered some sound advice to those left-wing Americans unsure whether to support Barack Obama’s campaign for re-election. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” observed the novelist, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind …
Mention the Democrats in Congress, and the emotional response of most left-leaning Americans will veer from moderate disappointment to frothing cynicism. Some pols fail to live up to their own hype as zealous reformers, while others seem mainly concerned with …
Editor’s note: this article appears in the Summer 2012 issue of Dissent. The online version has been updated and revised in light of recent developments in Egypt. During the first week of 2012, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces …
It now seems like ancient history: the few weeks between Barack Obama’s election in November 2008 and the onset, after the inauguration, of intransigent, increasingly successful Republican opposition to his entire program. That was a moment in which hostility to …
U.S. universities thought their students understood the deal. They would raise tuition fees, and customers (students) would gamely take out ever-increasing loans to pay for them. Protest about the price of education was reserved for those countries still clinging to …
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin Oxford University Press, 2011, 304 pp. Conservatism is idea driven. Its idée fixe is the defense of inequalities of wealth and power against challenges from below—that is …
