The Second Coming of What?
O n June 1993, the prominent Yale computer scientist David Gelernter opened a mail bomb sent by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who had singled Gelernter out as a leader of the technological revolution he despised. Badly hurt, Gelernter survived, and as a recent piece by him, “The Second Coming–A Manifesto” (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter/gelernter_index.html), shows, his voice on…
Torments of Liberalism
If there is a single thread that connects the free market liberalism of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to the more recent American liberal embrace of activist government, it is the idea of confident, continuous movement forward. Liberals have believed themselves to be pushing aside the cobwebs of history, ending ideology, freeing society from…
The Winner: Clintonism
L ast month, as victory slipped from Al Gore’s grasp, a palpable gloom settled over certain members of Washington’s opinion elite. Their candidate just wasn’t all he had been cracked up to be. Sure, he had made some concessions to the base, championed a couple of core issues, even cultivated a few of the party’s…
How Congress Acts
America’s Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through New Gingrich, by David R. Mayhew. Yale University Press, 257 pages, $30.00 Why was the Clinton health care plan rejected by Congress in 1994? Was it because of big-money lobbying from the health insurance industry? Or was the plan doomed from the first because Americans–anti-statists…
Two More Years
K arl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief campaign strategist, has compared this year’s election to that of 1896 and Bush himself to victorious Republican presidential candidate William McKinley. Rove argued that just as McKinley’s election created a new political alignment that reflected the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, Bush’s election in 2000 would…
Political Meatballs
In the world of political campaign advertising, there is nothing sweeter than coming up with an ad that is so clever or outrageous it gets free publicity. Ralph Nader hit the jackpot in the fall campaign with his spot that parodied MasterCard’s “priceless” commercial. Nader’s campaign even ended up getting sued by the credit card…
Democracy Deadlocked
T his is a dispatch from purgatory–the purgatory to which we’ve all been condemned until this business about the identity of our next president is cleared up. I’d never realized until quite late on election night just how nervous purgatory can make a person. This particular purgatory is finite, endless though it may seem; you…
Illegal Employers
W ho would have guessed that one of the issues deadlocking federal budget negotiations would be how many undocumented aliens to legalize? Just four years ago, Congress enacted, and the president signed, the toughest anti-immigrant legislation in decades. But today, labor, business, and political elites are praising as “essential workers” the immigrants they used to…
Housing:
G ary and Virginia have lived at Berkeley Place in lower Park Slope, Brooklyn, for the past 29 years, almost since moving to the United States from Trinidad in the late 1960s. It’s a peaceful neighborhood of oak trees and brownstones, a neighborhood of middle-class homeowners near the park and immigrant renters farther west, families…
The Squeeze
I n most city neighborhoods, the flight to the suburbs continues–with families leaving the city the moment they acquire the means. However, in a handful of trendy cities, there’s been a movement in the opposite direction. This may be just what the cities thought they wanted, but it often leaves the poor with nowhere to…
Bad Vibes in Alabama
A dvocates of censoring the Internet often argue that sexually explicit material today is “worse”–more graphic, more violent, more deviant, and more available–than it was 25 or 30 years ago. If only we could return to the innocent days of the 1950s and 1960s, when Playboy was considered risqué, they imply. Then we wouldn’t be…
Opposition as Opportunity
With Republicans in narrow control of Congress, Democrats should think big.
College for Dunces
T he electoral college is a constitutional time bomb that has been ticking for more than a century. It finally exploded on election day. Unkind as it is to say so–hasn’t Al Gore suffered enough?–it’s only fitting that it blew up in the Democrats’ face. The explosion, of course, was Gore’s apparent loss to George…
Campaign Reform
A funny thing happened on the way to making soft money the symbol for all that is wrong with the nation’s campaign finance system. Hard money–the stuff that is harder to amass because it is regulated by the Federal Election Campaign Act and limited in a variety of ways–has begun to look like virtuous money…
Taking Back Democracy
T his is the hour for reform, not recrimination. To view Ralph Nader as representing the “progressive left,” in opposition to liberals and moderates inside the Democratic Party, is to commit grave error. The passions aroused by the Nader campaign have much in common with those elicited by John McCain and Bill Bradley in their…
Home and the World
T he two main characters in South African playwright Athol Fugard’s classic chamber drama Boesman & Lena are a poor mixed-race couple. Their shanty has been razed by the “whiteman’s bulldozers,” leaving them to wander the dismal mudflats near Port Elizabeth, and as the play opens Boesman picks a spot for the night by silently…
The Roots of Rage
Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of the American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 288 pages, $15.00 (paper). Americans around the world are targets of terrorist attacks. Not just soldiers such as those killed on the USS Cole in Yemen this fall, but civilians, as well. Last year the State Department…
All the President’s Men
W hen the second season of NBC’s West Wing premiered in October, with nine Emmys on the mantel and the lives of many key presidential staffers dangling in the balance thanks to last season’s cliff-hanger assassination attempt, a stunning 25.1 million viewers tuned in to survey the damage. True, a bigger audience–about 50 million–watched the…
