Shop ‘Til You Drop
A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America By Lizabeth Cohen, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 567 pages, $35.00 In many a family memory, the 25 years between the end of World War II and the economic crisis of the 1970s were the “good years” of the 20th century. These were the…
Must Democracy Wait?
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad By Fareed Zakaria, W.W. Norton, 286 pages, $24.95 Fareed Zakaria’s wide-ranging examination of the difficulties and downsides of democracy makes gripping reading today, especially as the Bush administration announces its plans to hand a shocked and awed Iraq back to the Iraqis. Writing before the…
Gentle Europe, Tough America
Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe By James Q. Whitman, Oxford University Press, 311 pages, $35.00 This past March, a sharply divided Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of California’s “three strikes” law requiring long prison terms for third felonies. In the specific appeals before it, the Court let stay…
The Great Crash, Part II
In the Company of Owners: The Truth about Stock Options (And Why Every Employee Should Have Them) By Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse and Aaron Bernstein, Basic Books, $27.50, 344 pages Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron By Robert Bryce, Public Affairs, $27.50, 320 pages What Went Wrong at Enron: Everyone’s Guide to…
Will and Testament
Abbas Kiarostami was philosophical about the whole mess. U.S. officials had just denied the world-renowned filmmaker — and “axis of evil” Iranian citizen — a visa to attend last fall’s New York Film Festival. “I certainly do not deserve an entry visa any more than the aged mother hoping to visit her children in the…
Embed or in Bed?
In a standard supplement to their regular war package, mainstream media now occasionally feature — what else? — mainstream media criticism. This time around, the two prime subjects were (1) embedded reporters and (2) bombastic cable networks. Easier targets have never presented themselves. The cheerleaders of FOX News are surefire objects of scorn for networks…
Small-Town Blues
On April 17, about 50 residents of Encinal, Texas, drove across the railway tracks to the Veterans’ Hall community center to debate whether the impoverished town should add a large, privately run U.S. Marshals Service prison to its meager list of possessions. Specifically, they discussed an environmental assessment commissioned by prison proponents to reassure locals…
Rock and a Hard Place
Don’t envy Olympia Snowe. In the last two months, the Republican senator from Maine has been called to the White House for personal lobbying by the president and vice president, cornered by the House Ways and Means Committee chairman on the Senate floor, dubbed a “Daschle Republican” by The Wall Street Journal and denounced in…
Our Sitting President
The Bush administration’s inability to garner broad international support for its Iraq plans may go down in history as the result of the biggest diplomatic miscalculation since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time” in 1938. Mistaken as he was, Chamberlain still had one up on Bush: The British leader actually got…
American Bioscience Meets the American Dream
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” When Jacques Barzun made this famous diagnosis of American life in 1954, Wallace Laboratories was preparing to introduce the nation to a new drug called Miltown. Marketed as a “tranquilizer,” Miltown was the first prescription drug developed specifically for the anxiety…
W.’s Christian Nation
In November of 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president, a telling controversy arose at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association. When a reporter asked the governors how their party could both satisfy the demands of Christian conservatives and also maintain a broad political coalition, Mississippi’s Kirk Fordice took the opportunity to pronounce…
America’s Global Role
On May 27, 1999, at the invitation of then-Dean Paul Wolfowitz, I delivered a commencement address at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. I spoke about my vision for a global open society and Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense, seemed to be on the same wavelength. We had both…
Get Happy!
Not many commentators have been as insistent as I have that the Democrats stop letting themselves get kicked around and learn to play hardball the way the right plays it, an argument I’ve made in this magazine [see “Dems’ Fightin’ Words,” TAP, Aug. 26, 2002] and elsewhere. And so every time a Robert Byrd bashes…
Parents Fight Back
Ms. S. is a young, attractive single mother who used to work full-time for a marketing company in New York City. She was named employee of the month several times, and when the company decided to do some television promotion, she was asked to appear in the ads. She agreed, and, partly because of the…
The Bush Bankruptcy Plan
We are used to politicians moderating their programs once in office. But George W. Bush has done the opposite, ratcheting up his plans to the applause of conservatives while much of the public still doesn’t grasp the radical implications of what’s under way. Nowhere is this more evident than in the president’s fiscal policy. During…
Bush’s Poodle?
Tony Blair’s face says it all. It is etched with ruts and gullies where once there were laughter lines and humane creases. His cheeks have fallen in. The mental, political and emotional traumas of the last six months have left their indelible mark. He is the dedicated multilateral internationalist who has hitched his star to…
Squandering Prosperity
Economists are admitting to confusion, always a bad sign. The American economy has entered “a baffling twilight zone,” writes Robert J. Samuelson. “People yearn for clarity and confidence, while the new stagnation provides mainly uncertainty and contradiction.” The Federal Reserve seems particularly vexed. Profits and productivity are up, but growth is negligible and employment is…
Kant and Mill in Baghdad
In justifying their war against Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters based their case primarily on the threat to the United States posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda. But to date, American and British troops have found no signs of a chemical-, biological- or, more importantly, a nuclear-weapons program…
