For seventy years the disparate “Left” supported, belittled, glamorized, ignored, or attacked Saul Alinsky and his tradition of community organizing. Today, it should embrace community organizing, participate in it, and play the role that non-sectarian left organizers do in the …
Jim Rule’s reference to me is hard to parse, because the language is vague, but he’s essentially saying that anyone who now warns against a swift and complete withdrawal from Iraq must be trying to justify an earlier decision to …
The year 2006 pushed me into electoral politics. Not only did right-wing Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the public agenda, but in my very blue home state of Maryland, too many establishment …
The invasion of Iraq was a defining moment for the United States. This was the kind of war that many Americans believed formed no part of this country’s repertoire—an aggressive war of choice. Its aim was not to stop some …
I came out to my mother in a letter. I was twenty-eight. “I was born this way,” I wrote, following with the most shattering high note of self-loathing I can think of: “If there were a straight pill,” I lamented, …
“I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous. Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse. (The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in …
The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could …
What relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves. I think that it’s good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these …
In 1989, I strongly supported the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Without knowing much about China, I guess I supported the students partly out of a form of self-love; it seemed they wanted to follow my social and political …
I don’t know if my mother intended to die on Valentine’s Day. But she did. At nearly ninety-six and a half, Beatrice Katz had reached one of her goals, outliving her oldest sister by a few months. Her hospice nurse, …
From the start of the current economic crisis, commentators have compared the ongoing unpleasantness to the crash of 1929, with the implication that we might soon begin to suffer a version of the Great Depression if we did not avoid …
Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first …
Spoiler alert: This piece gives away key plot details about Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War adventure, like Bonnie and Clyde, is a distillation of the movies, tall tales, and shared legends that color our view of the past. …
Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country. It seems a good time for such a discussion. Both U.S. …
The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005. Sixteen issues, one book, and a quarter-million readers later, Democratiya is being incorporated into Dissent. Why? Well, when Dwight Macdonald closed Politics, his “one-man magazine,” in 1949, he cited the relentless demands of …
