The Populist Imperative
By all accounts, we are entering a month of great national deliberation. In the main arena, the most serious foreign-policy debate since Vietnam is unfolding, with senior members of the president’s own party among those articulating the most serious qualms. It’s almost what the Constitution’s framers had in mind: a great debate, conducted through congressional…
The Populist Fantasy
Looking forward to 2004, liberals and progressives have become embroiled in an argument over whether Democrats ought to embrace or reject populism. Pro-business moderates — or, more precisely, anti-anti-business moderates — have lambasted Al Gore’s 2000 campaign for overemphasizing “economic populism” and for slighting the “pro-growth” agenda advanced by the Democratic Leadership Conference and its…
Books in Review:
All Over but the Shoutin’ By Rick Bragg. Vintage Books, 329 pages, $14.00 Ava’s Man By Rick Bragg. Random House, 272 pages, $13.00 An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood By Jimmy Carter. Touchstone Books, 288 pages, $15.00 I am not a southerner, though I was raised like one. I grew up in…
A Not-So-Novel Approach
When a well-made film whistles past me without touching, when I’ve sat down and presented the astonished bull’s-eye of my brain to the filmmaker only to hear the arrow go harmlessly by my left ear, I have to assume that it was aimed elsewhere — that I may not, in fact, be the target audience.…
This Little Student Went to Market
“No matter what it is called, who does it or where in the institution it is being done, universities are engaging in marketing activity.” That message shocked academics when a marketing professor named Richard Krachenberg first delivered it in a 1972 Journal of Higher Education article. What schools referred to as recruiting was really advertising,…
Our Tropical Terrorist Tourist Trap
These days, it can be hard to tell that the United States still maintains its 40-year trade and travel embargo on Cuba. Jimmy Carter and Ralph Nader recently touched down on Fidel Castro’s communist island in the Caribbean, just 90 miles from Florida’s coast. North Dakota’s Republican governor John Hoeven went there to drum up…
Where’s the Movement?
In early June, the conservative Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote: “Enron has created a natural moment for a smart assault on capitalist excess. The wonder is that political leaders and social activists alike do not seem to have seized it.” By July, President Bush signed Sen. Paul Sarbanes’ (D-Md.) accounting-reform bill into law, but…
Bite the Ballot
For years conservatives had a corner on ballot initiatives. Think of California’s infamous Proposition 13, and the anti-tax blitzkrieg that swept after it through 43 states. Think of the anti-choice, anti-gay and anti-environment ballot measures of the last two decades. But 2002 seems to mark a turnaround. “This year it’s the liberals’ turn,” says M.…
Mute Witnesses
The morning sun glints against corrugated iron roofs scattered with car engines, beer crates and wire shopping carts. We are in Alexandra, one of the oldest shantytowns in Johannesburg, South Africa. Nelson Mandela rented a one-room shack here in the early 1940s. Today, dozens of yelling protesters push toward the backseat of a Toyota, where…
On the Contrary:
“When will it be OK to laugh again?” So the press and maybe the public wondered after last September 11. The moratorium on laughter, unofficially declared by David Letterman, was intended to signal respect for the dead and for the people who mourned them; but the desire for laughter persisted. Only people hungry for a…
Northern Light
“We’re slightly off course. But we wanted to let the trainee run the boat,” jokes Chellie Pingree over the din of an outboard motor. It’s a chilly, starlit September night off the coast of Rockland, Maine, and Pingree — a onetime farmer, divorced mother of three, former owner of a wool-knitting business and progressive Democratic…
A Cautious Opposition
Will George W. Bush’s decision to seek congressional approval for invading Iraq slow down the war juggernaut? Up to now, Democrats have only been willing to declare, as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) observed after President Bush’s Sept. 4 address to congressional leaders, that “To date, the administration has not made the case for military action…
Bad News
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the authorities trace every act of sabotage, every heresy, every defeat, to a fellow named Emmanuel Goldstein. Little is known about the man except his face, his past and his alleged crimes, but his existence is extraordinarily convenient. If Goldstein didn’t exist, his opponents would have had to invent him.…
War Resisters
Republican candidates are beating the war drums just as support for invading Iraq is dissipating. Whereas a Gallup Poll last November revealed 74 percent in favor of a ground invasion of Iraq and 20 percent opposed, this August the percentage of those in favor plummeted to 53, with 41 percent opposed — roughly the same…
My Tax Paradise
I counted on a $200 tax refund this year. But the Internal Revenue Service, perhaps sensing that I had vast hidden assets, adjusted my return, and I only got 129 bucks. As a magazine intern and a college student, I make a little less than the average citizen of the Bahamas, who earns about $15,000…
No Choice but War?
I should be among the supporters of an invasion of Iraq. A decade ago, after Iraq seized Kuwait, I agreed with the decision to go to war and wrote in The New Republic, at the start of the conflict, that allied forces should go all the way to Baghdad. My view was that Saddam Hussein…
Comment: Revolting Elites
By all accounts, we are entering a month of great national deliberation. In the main arena, the most serious foreign-policy debate since Vietnam is unfolding, with senior members of the president’s own party among those articulating the most serious qualms. It’s almost what the Constitution’s framers had in mind: a great debate, conducted through congressional…
