Lear: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! Pray you, undo this button: Bulgari-made, Gorgeous, surprisingly affordable, Thank you sir. Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there! Dies Lear, Act […]
Harold Meyerson
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
Posted inHousing and Transportation
Why Liberalism Fled the City … And How It Might Come Back
The strongholds of municipal liberalism are gone; the coalition of immigrants, unionists, poor people, and neighborhoods has been replaced by alliances between tough-on-crime Republican mayors and organized business. But the seeds of a revival are there.
Posted inFeatures
Life and Liberty
JUST HOW GOOD IS AMERICAN LIBERALISM’S INNER EAR? Defending an open society in the wake of September’s attacks demands that we strike the right balance between security and liberty, between the first of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights and the second; and that we remind our countrymen that in a battle of ideals with a […]
Posted inFeatures
Race Conquers All
New York, like Los Angeles, now has its new mayor; that’s the bad news. Seldom has a city elected a leader about whom it knew less or who seemed to know less about his city. Their mutual ignorance–New York’s of Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg’s of New York–seems almost total. In the course of his campaign, […]
Posted inFeatures
California’s Progressive Mosaic
Pa Joad: Ain’t you goin’ with us? Casey: I’d like to. There’s somethin’ goin’ on out there in the West, and I’d like to try and learn what it is. —The Grapes of Wrath More than 60 years after John Steinbeck’s Oakies headed west, California retains its […]
Posted inFeatures
City of Tomorrow
Even by the fast-forward standards of California politics, where term limits bump off the entire state legislature every eight years, Antonio Villaraigosa has had a meteoric career. In the early 1990s, he was an organizer for the teachers’ union, a county supervisor’s delegate on the L.A. transit board, and president of the American Civil Liberties […]
Posted inFeatures
L.A. Story
The old order still governs here; the future will not be rushed. Considering all the changes Los Angeles has gone through in just the past decade–white flight and immigrant influx, the displacement of the business elite, the rebirth of the union movement, the rise of a labor-Latino alliance–the idea that a new urban progressive coalition […]
Posted inFeatures
Democracy Deadlocked
T his is a dispatch from purgatory–the purgatory to which we’ve all been condemned until this business about the identity of our next president is cleared up. I’d never realized until quite late on election night just how nervous purgatory can make a person. This particular purgatory is finite, endless though it may seem; you […]
Posted inFeatures
Indentured Public Servant
A lan Cranston was always an organizer–one of the best of the post-World War II generation. Soon after the war ended, he founded and built the United World Federalists, an expression of postwar one-worldism that valiantly battled the Cold War zeitgeist. After he left the U.S. Senate eight years ago, he founded and built the […]