For 20 years, the party now in power has been crusading for smaller government. But that was then. Since Sept. 11, we’ve gotten a rude awakening that everything from our personal and national security to the rebuilding of a stunned economy depends on an effective government. We also got a look at public workers in […]
Robert Kuttner
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America.
Posted inArticle
Shame On Journalists for Forgetting Orwell
In his timeless essay ”Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell explored how manipulation of words can change how people think. Orwell noted Stalin’s use of the word ”liquidation” as a delicate synonym for execution of political enemies among several other examples. Generations of freshman English students and aspiring journalists have read their Orwell and […]
Posted inFeatures
China Fallout
Will the Democratic Party’s divisions over the China/ WTO vote prove fatal? For the sputtering Gore campaign, the timing could hardly be worse. The scenario recalls the 1994 NAFTA split prefiguring the party’s defeat in the 1994 midterm elections. In both cases, President Clinton depended heavily on Republican allies to win an agenda shaped by […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
The Limits of Markets
The claim that the freest market produces the best economic and social outcome is the centerpiece of the conservative political resurgence. But without government intervention, the market can destroy a lot of things–including itself.
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Up From 1994
S ince Franklin Roosevelt, the central liberal credo has been the use of government to benefit ordinary people. That premise is now battered–fiscally, politically, ideologically. In 1994, swing voters rejected both the concept and the party of government. The 1994 midterm election is not yet the epochal realignment that prefigures a new governing coalition and […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Only Connect
The New York Times Book (sic) Review for March 6, 1994 ran a feature piece reviewing a CD-ROM. “Microsoft Art Gallery,” an interactive digitized catalog of Britain’s National Gallery collection, won a rave. Just point and click, and you can pull up paintings by artist, period, or genre; you can also get spoken critical commentaries […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Back to the Future
During the postwar boom, it seemed that mass unemployment had been cured forever. A mixed economy–based on activist government, deficit spending, public investment, strong trade-unionism, a welfare state, and a warfare state–kept the industrial West on a high-growth path. Living standards rose steadily. Satisfied voters returned to office politicians who believed in this model. Not […]
Posted inWorking in America
Market, State, and Dystopia
A dystopia is a utopia in reverse. The post-1980 era is likely to be remembered as a free market dystopia–a headlong compulsion to throw away the mixed economy that was built on the ruins of depression and world war in favor of a marketized society. This compulsion has been ground into the lenses of the […]