Democratic Détente
For two decades, the Democratic party has been riven by sharp ideological arguments. Those debates were in some respects necessary and important. But it’s obvious that many of those conflicts are irrelevant to our moment, and say far more about the past than the future. The road to nowhere is paved with rote disputes between…
Solve Inequality with Democracy
We both work in New York City, where the deepening inequality documented in the preceding articles is palpable in everyday life. Housing prices in Manhattan recently reached an average of $1 million, a cost that requires annual earnings of about $400,000 to amortize. Looking at the country as a whole, CEOs in the financial sector…
Rocky Mountain Low
During his 12 years as a U.S. Congressman from Colorado, David Skaggs did his best to listen to all his constituents. He held open office hours during which anyone could just walk in. He hosted town meetings around his district, which covered the northwest suburbs of Denver. He set up at supermarkets, talking to whoever…
Fighting Turnout Burnout
In the last two presidential elections, about half of Americans did not vote; many of them said they were too busy or not interested enough. In non-presidential-election years, voter turnout has barely exceeded one-third of voting-age adults. The American record is especially embarrassing in contrast to nearly every other advanced democracy. In national elections since…
Health and Wealth
A look at Americans’ health reveals the astonishing inequalities in our society. American girls are born with a life expectancy that ranks 19th in the world (in another survey they fall to 28th). Male babies rank 31st — in a dead tie with Brunei. Among the 13 wealthiest countries, the United States ranks last or…
Unenlightened Self-Interest
The share of income going to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of American families quadrupled between 1970 and 1998, leaving the 13,000 richest families with almost as much income as the 20 million poorest families. Ordinary Americans seem to be well aware of this growing gap between rich and poor. In a recent opinion…
Race and Representation
In our new multiracial society, minorities need strategically effective coalitions.
The Narrowing of Civic Life
Coming together in trade unions and farmers’ associations, fraternal chapters and veterans’ organizations, women’s groups and public-reform crusades, Americans more than a century ago created a raucous democracy in which citizens from all walks of life could be leaders and help to shape community life and public agendas. But U.S. civic life has changed fundamentally…
Our Unequal Democracy
When the constitutional convention was held in 1787, one of the participants’ major worries was that a democratic government based on majority rule could pose a threat to minorities. They were especially worried that majority rule could encourage a largely landless electorate to expropriate the property of people like themselves. They thus adopted a system…
What Do Mothers Want?
The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, Free Press, 383 pages, $26.00 Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life By Daphne de Marneffe, Little, Brown, 401 pages, $25.95 The natives are restless again. For the past…
Moving the Earth
Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment By James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 299 pages, $24.00 More than 30 years ago, in 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the world on notice, warning that the rapidly expanding human enterprise was jeopardizing the stability…
Freedom’s New Fight
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity By Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press, 345 pages, $24.95 In the mid-1990s, Alex Alben pioneered a new Hollywood genre: a DVD retrospective on an actor’s career, structured around contemporary interviews with the actor but including clips…
All the President’s Handouts
Plan of Attack By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 480 pages, $28.00 Future historians will point to two interrelated foreign-policy disasters that could make George W. Bush a one-term president, if the voters pay attention. The first is the well-documented failure of the Bush administration to take al-Qaeda seriously enough, both before and…
For America
Anti-Americanism By Jean-François Revel, translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell, Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95 On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense By David Brooks, Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $25.00 Jean-François-Revel, author of the best-selling Without Marx or Jesus, wrote Anti-Americanism to…
A Simple Plan
On April 27, beneath the fluorescent lights of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ basement conference room, Representative Jim Turner unveiled “Winning The War on Terror,” a large report prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. Turner hoped that the report might spark national debate over what could…
The Seduction
Last July, as the debate over a Medicare prescription-drug bill heated up, AARP, the nation’s largest senior-citizen lobbying organization with some 35 million members, sent a letter to Congress detailing issues that “must be fixed” before it could endorse a final bill. Among the group’s chief concerns were “program structure and the adequacy and affordability…
Hauteur Theory
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had not yet visited the United States when they completed Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Luckily, they didn’t let this deter them from pretending they had. Brecht’s libretto, one of the most wild-eyed and unflattering portraits of this country ever put…
Drowned Out
Readers of The American Prospect don’t need to hear that Donald Rumsfeld has been an awful defense secretary, that our actions in Iraq are fueling global terrorism, that George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the rich are widening the gap between the rich and everyone else, that our government is now run by corporate America…
Mission Semi-Accomplished
So far the Democrats’ magic bullet seems to be falling short. Ever since the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation passed, Democrats have looked to so-called 527 groups — named after a part of the tax code that allows groups to raise unlimited sums and make independent expenditures on issues — to save them from cash shortfalls (specifically…
How Nancy Pelosi Took Control
“It’s rough around here,” Nancy Pelosi says softly, almost in passing, as she scurries down a Capitol hallway from one meeting to another, greeting colleagues and staffers as she goes. The “here” in question is the House of Representatives, where Pelosi has been the Democratic leader for the past year and a half. What she…
Silence of the Flock
If Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a problem, what is the problem, and whose problem is it, anyway? There are in fact two problems, and their relationship is both oblique and shadowy. The most important is the film’s anti-Semitism. Gibson and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, say they didn’t intend to make an…
Prospects
When other aspects of the Iraq War have long been forgotten, the images of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison will still be remembered. No, the soldiers who committed the abuse are not representative of Americans in Iraq, but the torture itself is representative of the perversion of American ideals and collapse of…
Wise After All
In the weeks preceding the U.S. attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, George W. Bush asserted that “a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the world.” What Bush preached was a kind of muscular dominance permitting the United States to…
Waiting to Happen
When President George W. Bush asserted in his May 5 attempt to mollify the Arab and Muslim worlds that “what took place in [the Abu Ghraib] prison does not represent the America I know,” Judy Greene nearly spat out a spoonful of dinner in disbelief. A veteran prison-policy analyst with the group Justice Strategies, Greene…
