Why has Barack Obama—one of the most eloquent and thoughtful of recent presidents—become such a terrible politician? Midway through his sixth year in office, his ineptitude is pretty clear. He frustrated and demobilized the huge base he built during his …
Out in the Union, a new book by Miriam Frank, shows that unions have been crucial to the growth and success of the modern LGBT rights movement.
Contemporary American leftists do not, as a rule, think kindly about the history of the nation they inhabit. Centuries of slavery, the bloody conquest of Indian and Mexican lands, and two long imperial wars in East Asia sullied, if not …
“Monica Lewinsky quoted you. Did you hear?” a friend called to say. My first reaction was: I’m being pranked. But there in Monica Lewinsky’s recent Vanity Fair essay, “Shame and Survival”—her account of what happened to her after her affair …
President Obama is “madder than hell” at the Department of Veterans Affairs. At issue is whether VA hospitals in the Southwest and elsewhere used off-the-books lists to hide the fact that veterans often waited months to see doctors, dozens allegedly …
Bernie Sanders may actually run for president. The feisty Senator from Vermont is giving dinner speeches in Iowa, telling journalists he’s “prepared” to campaign, and is deciding whether he wants to compete for the Democratic nomination or take the “radical” …
The March on Washington was initiated not to break down racial barriers to voting rights, education, and public accommodations but to highlight “the economic subord-ination of the Negro” and advance a “program for economic justice.”
No liberal democracy, political party, market economy, or human right is set in stone. People created these concepts, and people have the power to destroy them. These social constructs are often elevated to the rank of universal laws or endowed …
The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 432 pp. As the overall unionization rate in the United States dips ever closer to single digits, the …
Dissent is a magazine for people who worry. So here is something to worry about, highlighted by Barack Obama’s inaugural address. I am certainly glad that it was his inauguration, but what he said or, better, didn’t say, illustrates one …
Now that I am about to become an ordinary Dissentnik, I want to describe how that happened once before—in 1954, when I held the first issue of the magazine in my hands. I grew up in the Popular Front, reading …
Is there a difference between a liberal and a social democrat that amounts to a distinction? If there is, is it a distinction with merit? Michael Walzer is a social democrat; it is an honorary badge. For a long time, …
House-to-house canvassing is the epitome of routinized labor: you knock on the doors the campaign’s algorithms determine you should knock on; campaign officials ask you to follow a “script” they have tested in polls and focus groups. Efficiency is paramount. …
After November 6, 2012, the big sound rippling around the world was not a chorus of bipartisanship, not a whoop of euphoria, but a collective sigh of relief. Still, it must not be forgotten that nearly half of America’s voters …
This January marked the fortieth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. In ways not anticipated by the coalition of physicians and feminist health activists who fought to legalize abortion in the years …
