The city of Ferguson has reneged on its promises to reform policing practices. Its current standoff with the Justice Department reveals the stubbornness of a municipal system that combines handouts to big corporations with predatory fines for the poor.
By reframing war in terms of “moral injury,” philosopher Nancy Sherman dodges the question of who is responsible for its horrors in the first place.
Why does the white-haired firebrand from Vermont insist on identifying himself with socialism, a political faith that has never been popular in the United States?
An interview with historian Lisa McGirr about her new book The War On Alcohol, and why Prohibition was more important than most people think.
The Gulf countries’ migrant labor regime is brutal. But calling it “slavery” obscures what is really a highly modern system of exploitation—and the struggles of workers themselves to change it.
An interview with Daniel Oppenheimer about his new book Exit Right, a survey of the twentieth-century American left, seen through the eyes of six men who left it behind and turned to the right.
Despite the right’s appeals to “family values,” free-market policies are extremely destructive to American families.
The Democratic elite’s dismissal of the Sanders campaign ultimately reflects a contempt for democratic ideals.
Joel Berger, a second-generation Detroit public school teacher, talks about teacher protests over the city’s dilapidated schools and the water crisis in Flint.
From apple orchards in the 1930s to Flint today, lead poisoning—and politicians seeking to cover it up—have a long history in the United States.
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a magisterial portrait of the right-wing billionaires who have “weaponized” conservative philanthropy and pulled the GOP ever further right. Yet Mayer’s account fails to explain something just as alarming: the far-right surge from the grassroots.
Personal budgeting advice promises to set us free, but only on an individual level. Instead we need social programs that would allow any woman to flip a finger to unsavory work situations and domestic abuse.
If Bernie Sanders’s presidential run is to herald a new socialist movement, American leftists will have to overcome the combination of sectarianism, repression, and cooptation that doomed their predecessors.
What’s the difference between socialism and social democracy? In 1991, Dissent convened several longtime contributors to answer that question, somewhat rephrased: what would distinguish socialism from a slightly improved version of Sweden?
City on Fire—Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive and elaborately constructed novel about New York in the 1970s—offers the contours of the great social novel. But it struggles to reveal the ways in which power actually works.
