Global Denial
As floodwaters recede and bodies emerge, Americans are belatedly making some terrible connections about the Bush administration, which has a contempt for public planning matched only by its habit of subordinating reality to public relations. One aspect, of course, is Iraq. The other is the needless tragedy in New Orleans. The Hurricane Katrina disaster is…
New Century, New Challenges
“The Death of Environmentalism” has stimulated a lot of debate, and not just at tables where environmentalists gather. It asks questions that are legitimate and necessary to consider: how to fight Wal-Mart, how to win universal health care, how to create a world of limitless opportunity instead of widespread hunger and disease. It suggests the…
An Emergent Progressive Majority
Progressives should be optimistic as we look toward the 2006 midterm elections. A recent CNN/ Gallup Poll shows that a record-high 54 percent of Americans believe that the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq. Surging gas prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and struggles to keep up with the…
A New Environmentalism
Mclean County, Kentucky, is so red that political operatives might call it crimson. You can’t get much further from the image of a latte-drinking liberal than Bernadine Edwards, a local school-bus driver. She speaks with a soft Kentucky lilt as she looks out over the green valley that has been in her family for more…
Shooting The Moon
The mission of the 2-year-old, Washington, D.C.–based Apollo Alliance has come to represent a bold vision of progressivism. Named for President Kennedy’s moon shot, the alliance’s goal is to mobilize a sweeping federal commitment to energy independence, with the triple-whammy promise of creating good jobs with new technology, bolstering national security with energy independence, and…
Death Warmed Over
James Howard Kunstler begins The Long Emergency, his new book warning that the world is running out of oil, by quoting psychologist Carl Jung as saying, “People cannot stand too much reality.” The quote is wrongly attributed. It was T.S. Eliot who said, “Humankind cannot stand too much reality.” But the quote and the Jungian…
A Breath Of Fresh Air
The crowning achievement in urban health came in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when a series of broad changes transformed the social and material environment for millions of inner-city Americans. Important policies aimed at improving children’s health, working conditions, housing, and public sanitation translated into dramatic improvements in the health of the average American. And…
The End Of The Population Movement
On a typically bright and sunny day on the corner of 24th and Mission in San Francisco, the trade in forged birth certificates and Social Security cards flows with the same efficiency as the burrito shops that surround the BART rail station. On this day I watched three people order or pick up their papers…
Only Yesterday
More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson (Princeton University Press, 379 pages, $29.95) Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $35.00) Anyone wishing to understand the United States in the three decades after World…
An Economic Tsunami
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz (Basic Books, 278 pages, $26.95) Globalization: Why It Works by Martin Wolf (Yale University Press, 398 pages, $30.00) Will the United States benefit from the new wave of globalization sweeping the economy, as it did from…
See It Again
The irresistible force of America’s post–World War II Red Scare first slammed into the immovable object of network television in September 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that TV’s biggest star had registered to vote in the 1936 election as a Communist. The redhead was a Red. For the next week, Lucille Ball…
Changing The Climate
It’s hard to remember how popular the environmental idea was at the end of the 1980s. The movement had survived the crude efforts of the Reagan administration to kill it off. (Remember James Watt? Remember Treasury Secretary Don Regan advising that the best defense against a thinning ozone layer was a baseball cap and a…
A Perfect Storm?
Is Hurricane Katrina a transformative political moment? Is this finally the time when Americans appraise the failure of the Bush administration — that is, the failure of modern conservatism — and say, “Enough”? Can liberals seize the opportunity those failures represent to make a case for a different society, in which repeated warnings about the…
The Paradox Explained
How can the Bush administration be so disciplined and effective at politics and so undisciplined and ineffectual at governing? No White House in living memory has been as successful at squelching leaks and keeping cabinet members on message, reaching down into the bureaucracy to bend analyses in directions that support its goals, imposing its will…
The Afterlife Of Environmentalism
A year ago, two committed activists with serious credentials in the environmental movement released a report proclaiming “the death of environmentalism.” In so doing, they sparked a debate that continues to this day. While some have suggested that both the authors and their accusations emerged from nowhere, they in fact put a spotlight on some…
Tax Follies At TNR
You have to wonder. Half to three-quarters of the American public doesn’t believe in evolution (depending on how you define it). One out of three Americans thinks the budget deficit can be eliminated (a) by hoping (or praying) that it goes away (8 percent) or (b) by cutting taxes even more (25 percent). Anti-scientific, un-arithmetic…
Leadership, Please
George W. Bush’s cynicism and incompetence have come back to haunt him, earlier than might have been predicted. As a result, history has dealt Democrats an opportunity. Whether they will rise to the occasion remains to be seen. Michael Tomasky addresses the politics of the New Orleans catastrophe elsewhere in this issue. Although Hurricane Katrina…
Dossier: Bordering On Ludicrous
In August, Governors Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Janet Napolitano of Arizona declared states of emergency due to illegal immigration across their borders … The declarations allow the governors to spend nearly $1.5 million each to bolster the states’ law enforcement and border patrols … In 2004, 537,151 people were naturalized to the United…
Labor Gains?
“City and state, please?” For a moment I think the voice at the other end of the phone belongs to a telephone operator, but I’ve been conned: I’m talking to a piece of voice-recognition technology. Over the course of the last two decades, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) has seen the loss of thousands…
Withdrawal Pains
Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council counterterrorism chief whose book criticizing the Bush administration — and the White House’s ferocious counterattack — briefly dominated public debate in summer 2004, doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience. At a lunch in Washington organized by Steve Clemons, director of the New America Foundation’s foreign-policy program, Clarke…
State of the State
Driving on the four-lane highway past the cushy American-style Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anana to the Jewish settlement of Ariel, there’s a clear drop in the countryside from green trees to brown, rocky hilltops. This is the “Green Line,” the 1967 border. There are no checkpoints to mark contested land because the road was built…
The Neocon Who Isn’t
On a Saturday in January 2003, as the Iraq War approached, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment convened a meeting in a nondescript building in Arlington, Virginia, with three dozen of Washington’s top conservative policy intellectuals. Using an information-gathering technique dating back to the Eisenhower administration, the office asked four groups to study the long-term…
They’re Ba-ack
In August, on the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act, the White House released a three-sentence presidential statement. “For 70 years,” it read, “Social Security has been a vital program and helped millions of America’s seniors in retirement. The Social Security system is sound for today’s seniors, but there is a…
We’re All Environmentalists Now
For the environmental community, “The Death of Environmentalism” hit last year with the force of a tsunami, leaving its audience so taken aback by its sweeping, cocksure condemnation of their decades of selfless struggle that they could barely think about it rationally, even when they accepted its basic truth. On the other hand, among progressives…
Laboratories Of Progress
In the absence of federal progress, state and local governments have emerged as key arenas for policies to address global warming. These policies include strategies to encourage the use of cleaner cars, renewable energy, high-performance buildings, and, most importantly, the proposal to cap carbon-dioxide emissions from utilities in the Northeast. State and local programs won’t…
Coast To Coast
Midway through Virginia Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine’s presentation–cum–slide show, a tour de force on education policy in the state where Democrat Kaine is running for governor in November’s upcoming election, a slide like no other abruptly appears on the screen. It shows mestizo peasant children in a barren room clustering around some young Yanqui –…
The Defectors
Rick Larsen is a third-term Democratic representative from Lake Stevens in Washington state. A balding former publicist for the Washington State Dental Association, Larsen, 40, is a proud member of the New Democrat Coalition. His district, Washington’s 2nd, runs north from the Seattle suburbs to the Canadian border. It is, on balance, fairly liberal –…
