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 …
Soon after Barack Obama won a second term with surprising ease, Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist Clay Bennett depicted a wealthy, white-haired man staring grimly at his television screen while around and behind him four servants, white and black, go about their jobs …
By working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its larger institutional ambitions—has its advantages, but without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough.
Liberals have an obsession with the presidency. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt strode across the political arena like a colossus (albeit a colossus in a wheelchair), liberals have tended to equate success with electing one of their own to the White …
