The Permanent Election
One of the things that distinguishes advanced democracies from banana republics is that winners and losers accept the results of elections. Losing candidates and parties don’t initiate coups. Winners don’t kill off the losers and their supporters. The winning party has an opportunity to govern. Both sides go back to their respective corners — winners…
The Other Eye of the Beholder
Regarding the Pain of Others By Susan Sontag, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 139 pages, $20.00 “Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death”: Thirty years after the first of the essays eventually collected in On Photography, which was published in 1977, Susan Sontag is still troubled by the aesthetic, moral…
Campaign Reform Boomerang
Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation and Betrays Our Democracy By Mark Green, Regan Books, 352 pages, $24.95 Campaign Finance Reform and the Future of the Democratic Party By Jerrold E. Schneider, Routledge, 208 pages, $19.95 Reformers and their adversaries, Democratic and Republican partisans, and editorial writers alike generally make…
The King and Thai
When talking history, Thais can only restrain themselves for so long before they trot out a much-cherished fact: Their homeland is the sole country in Southeast Asia never to have been colonized. And so it is no surprise that more nationalistic citizens find Hollywood incursions — upon both domestic box-office receipts and the telling of…
Signs of a Pulse
I noted in the June Prospect that while the bombs were bursting over Iraq, America’s TV networks were so excited about embedding with troops that they declined to subject the war’s rationale to serious scrutiny. How could hype, hysteria, wishful distortion and rank deception in high places be news when there were no — well,…
The Liberal Label
“The masquerade is over; it’s time to … use the dreaded ‘L’ word, to say the policies of our opposition … are liberal, liberal, liberal.” — Ronald Reagan, 1988 Since the 1930s, the landscape of American political discourse has been framed by the words liberal versus conservative. In this era, U.S. commentators first began to…
Framing the Dems
On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words “tax relief” started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external…
Let Them Eat Words
I’m one of many Democrats who watch in frustration (mixed with a touch of awe) as Republicans win with words, even as the labels they devise for their policies distort or belie the facts. Take the repeal of the estate tax. An “estate” sounds like a large amount of money. Indeed, before President Bush persuaded…
Class and Warfare
No matter how events develop in the coming months, either in Iraq or in American politics, Democrats who disagree with policies of the Bush administration will still have to confront a fundamental challenge: finding a way to talk foreign affairs with working-class Americans. Until now, Republican mouthpieces and conservative commentators have had only limited success…
Organize or Die
It was one of those awkward meetings that nobody looked forward to, and it produced an outcome nobody really liked. On Tuesday, Aug. 5, the executive council of the AFL-CIO turned its attention to the vexing question of what to do with the Carpenters. The union had withdrawn from the labor federation in 2001, with…
Talking American
Now that Democrats desperately want a presidential candidate who speaks passionately, speaks to the point, and speaks like a normal person and not a politician, one contender answers their prayers. Too bad his target is his own party. Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) begins his speeches by asking, “What I want to know is why…
Mothers Most Vulnerable
For some time I’ve tried to convince anyone who will listen that mothers — including those who are educated and middle class — are the most financially vulnerable people in the United States. Mothers of all races and income levels are less secure economically than comparable men or childless women, to such an extent that…
Remember the Maine
AUGUSTA, MAINE — In Latin, the word dirigo, Maine’s state motto, means “I lead” or “I direct.” On a sleepy summer Wednesday at the Maine State House, with the legislature out of session, this slogan at first seems out of place. Scattered visitors waltz into the capitol without passing through security, having parked their cars…
Overpaying the Pentagon
When George Bush Senior’s administration decided that the end of the Cold War made it safe to reduce the defense budget and the size of our armed forces, many neoconservatives and defense hawks, some of whom were serving in that administration, argued against the move. They wanted the United States to maintain military dominance in…
Language and Leadership
Ever since George W. Bush took office, we have marveled at his ability to speak as a moderate, govern as a radical, and not be held accountable by the press or the voters. Democrats, meanwhile, have struggled to find their voice. In this issue of the Prospect, in the centennial year of George Orwell’s birth,…
An Ounce of Detention
In Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, set in the not-all-that-distant future, police in Washington, D.C., have hit upon a way — through the enslavement of psychic visionaries — to predict and prevent future crimes. Would-be criminals are apprehended before they actually break the law and are punished for their intent to do so. But as one…
Immaterial and Unsupportable
On May 19, in one of the first anti-terrorism cases brought against U.S. citizens since September 11, Mukhtar al-Bakri, a 23-year-old Yemeni American from Lackawanna, N.Y., pleaded guilty to the charge of providing “material support” to al-Qaeda. Prior to 9-11, al-Bakri and five other young Yemeni Americans had traveled to an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan,…
Strange Bedfellows
Early in the afternoon of July 25, Laura W. Murphy, the director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, was waiting for a friend at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. They were due to head off for a quick Mexican lunch, and then to the offices of The Houston Chronicle, to try…
Bush’s Secret Government
Washington has seen its share of odd sights in the last few years but few as bizarre as the one we witnessed late last month after the release of the report on the causes and consequences of the September 11 terrorist attacks. There in front of the White House, fresh from a meeting with President…
From’s Last Stand
Al From is quivering with rage. It’s the end of a long day in late July at the Wyndham Philadelphia, and with a sheen of sweat coating his face, he gleams with emotion as he launches into the closing speech of the day at the DLC’s annual conference. It’s a grim speech, delivered in rousing,…
Nuclear Wal-Mart?
The Bush administration hailed as a victory North Korea’s announcement in late July that it would participate in six-party talks on its nuclear program. The White House had insisted for months that Pyongyang’s illicit activities were a regional issue best resolved in a multilateral setting. But unless the administration enters the new talks willing to…
