Dave Denison

In one of last year’s cheekiest works of social criticism, Russell Jacoby argued that what ails modern politics is a lack of utopian thinking (The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Norton). Politics has become dull, according to Jacoby. We live in a time of “political exhaustion and retreat,” of […]

Works discussed in this essay: Reading Mixed Signals: Ambivalence in American Public Opinion about Government, by Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril. Woodrow Wilson Center Press (distributed by the Johns Hopkins University Press), 253 pages. “Retro-Politics: The Political Typology, Version 3.0,” report by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, 163 […]

Works discussed in this essay: Republic Of Denial: Press, Politics, and Public Life, by Michael Janeway. Yale University Press; 216 pages. And now a word of discouragement. Abandon hopes, all ye who look to the nation’s journalists to lead the way through the valley of darkness. For the republic is in deep doo-doo, as […]

Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government andHealth Care, by John E. McDonough. University of California Press, 342 pages, $19.95. Toward the end of this useful handbook on the politics of lawmaking,the author laments the dearth of novels and films about what really goeson inside legislatures. After all, it is through popular art that thebroad […]

The stage is set for Vice President Al Gore. There’s a lectern at center stage with the vice presidential seal. Off to the left is an antique television, which Gore will later tell us is a vintage 1946 model. This is in the auditorium of the Herbert C. Hoover Building, which houses the United States […]