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Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, as well as a distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week and continues to write columns in The Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.

Recent Articles

The Poverty of Neoliberalism

Robert KuttnerDec 06, 2000

In the late 1970s, a group of one-time liberals began describing themselves as neoliberals. 'We criticize liberalism," Charles Peters, editor of the neoliberal Washington Monthly, wrote in 1983, "not to destroy it but to renew it by freeing it from its myths, from its old automatic responses..." Neoliberals often join conservatives in lambasting public programs, skewering bureaucrats, and celebrating the power of the market. They also attack special interest groups in the name of a more embracing public interest, untainted by politics. Much of their criticism is entertaining; some of it is even fair.

Collateral Damage

Robert KuttnerDec 04, 2000

War is seldom good for liberalism. The liberal view of international relations tends to emphasize peace through international law, even though the reach of law is weakest across national frontiers, where no sovereignty exists. Liberals also recoil from the plain violence of war. And they often tend to read their own good intentions into the motives and actions of adversaries who have nothing but contempt for liberal norms and values.

Congress Without Cohabitation: The Democrats' Morning-After

Robert KuttnerDec 04, 2000

On September 30, 1990, after being closeted for weeks at Andrews Air Force Base with White House representatives Richard Darman and John Sununu, Democratic congressional leaders brought back an agreement on the federal budget that the press initially treated as a historic compromise. It was actually an astonishingly Republican document -- and a symbol of how deeply compromised the Democrats had become sharing power with a Republican administration. To slay the deficit, the agreement cut Medicare by $60 billion, limited any peace dividend, blocked new domestic spending, and relied on regressive taxes that would have increased the tax burden of the poorest Americans by 11 percent, the middle class by 3.3 percent, and the richest one percent of Americans by just 1.7 percent.

Beyond the Guns of August

Robert KuttnerDec 04, 2000

At this writing, American and Iraqi forces still face each other warily across the Saudi sands. Sooner or later, Iraq will likely have to reverse course. But beyond the question of how and when the immediate military crisis will be resolved, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait has given momentum to the development of a post-Cold War international system based on collective security. That movement may also help bring about progress toward a regional settlement in the Mideast and a more stable regime for the price and supply of oil.

Atlas Unburdened: America's Economic Interests in a New World Era

Robert KuttnerDec 04, 2000

The end of the Cold War era invites a strategic shift in the economic as well as the military posture of the United States. Pluralism in the former Eastern bloc means that the East-West conflict ceases to be the defining strategic reality. Moreover, the coming of age of Western Europe and Japan signals a new pluralism of economic power in the West. The birth of these twin pluralisms calls for a fundamental redefinition of the American national interest.

Yet, thus far, these dramatic changes have not generated a fundamental reappraisal or major initiatives from American officials, other than a willingness to begin gradual arms reduction. For the basic American conception of its global interest tenaciously resists revision. Since the late

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