You lose an election with your second worst performance ever, and 20,000 people join the party in the aftermath. Then the leadership contenders—all but one prominent ministers in the last government—compete with each other to distance themselves from that government’s …
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University Louis Menand W.W. Norton, 2010 Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities Martha C. Nussbaum Princeton University Press, 2010 IN 1922, Austrian art …
We hear a lot today about federalism, the doctrine that emphasizes the rights and powers of the states versus those of the federal government. The political Right expresses alarm at the dramatic expansion in central government power that began under …
We are currently enduring one of America’s periodic freak-outs about immigration. State legislators rush to enact laws allowing police to grill anyone they suspect of lacking the right documents, leading Republicans advocate repealing the “birthright” section of the Fourteenth Amendment, …
We are surprised by Mark Engler’s criticism of our essay, “Democracy Undermined,” in the Summer 2010 issue of Dissent, in which we lament the heavy-handed use of the law to dismantle democracy in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, purportedly to build …
When I tell people that I live in my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., their most common response is, “Why?” Rochester is the fifty-first largest metro region in the United States, a tad smaller than Buffalo and a tad bigger than …
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, Volume 1, 942 pp., Volume 2, 1,034 pp. IN 1936, the great Lincoln historian J.G. Randall provocatively asked, “Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?” At a moment when …
A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert B. Stepto Harvard University Press, 2010, 179 pp., $22.95 THE NOMINATION, election, and inauguration of Barack Obama signified a multiplicity of things to a multitude of …
Nothing feeds jolly bankers and dyspeptic pundits more than a tasty crisis, and this year’s turmoil over the Euro has provided an especially rich diet to critics of state-owned enterprises and public sector social programs. “What we’re seeing in Greece …
In 1960, Paul Goodman—social thinker, activist, poet, and novelist—published his groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An examination of youth disaffection in our affluent but spiritually empty society, Goodman’s work inspired and galvanized a burgeoning generation of sixties students and intellectuals. …
“OUR PUBLIC officials are not much concerned about the ‘waste of human resources’…. But … the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring,” noted Paul Goodman—a half-century ago—in Growing Up Absurd. “Our …
I’m still puzzled fifty years later by what it was about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black …
On June 21, residents of Fremont, a small meatpacking town just outside Omaha, Nebraska, voted by 57 percent to deny work and shelter to undocumented immigrants. Why Fremont, Nebraska, and why now? Some observers, not knowing the Fremont measure was …
In general, I’m not a big fan of leaders in Latin America eliminating or loosening term limits so that they can stay in office longer. I also believe that recent processes of constitutional reform in many Latin American countries have …
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, …
