Tocqueville didn’t get everything right about Americans, but understanding him as a real, flawed observer makes his achievement more impressive.
Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton and is the author of Bob Dylan in America, which Doubleday will publish later this year.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Close of an Era
Several new books on the rise and fall of conservatism look at the secrets of the movement’s decades-old success — and modern-day failures.
Posted inColumns
Among the Bear-Baiters
I’m writing this while enjoying one of the most satisfying moments of my day, one of the most satisfying moments known to humanity. It’s morning. I prefer to take a sip, even two, from my favorite old oversized coffee cup, with a glazed blue-checker band, before firing up. My lighter has been acting up lately, […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Build an “A” Team
My advice, President Kerry, is that you assemble a political “A” team, install it in the West Wing, and fight like hell against the right over the next four years. “We ought to have two real parties,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told speechwriter and adviser Sam Rosenman in 1942, “one liberal and the other conservative.” […]
Posted inArticle
Boomerang Effect
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to stay the California recall election makes clear as never before that the entire effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis can only be understood in light of the Florida recount struggle of 2000 — and of the larger efforts by the Republican Party to undermine democracy in […]
Posted inArticle
Inveterate Confederates
Trent Lott’s sudden ousting as Senate majority leader seems part of a calculated effort by Republicans, led by the White House, to kill the controversy over the party’s alliance with neo-Confederate forces as quickly as possible. But like some sort of shameful partisan ghost, the spirit of that alliance still haunts the Republicans, and will […]
Posted inFeatures
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 […]
Posted inFeatures
A Scandal for our Time:
The Enron affair is shaping up as quite possibly the largest political and financial scandal in American history. Untold billions of dollars have vanished down the drain in the biggest bankruptcy filing ever. Political connections ensnare every level of the Bush administration. Even more fearsomely than in the past, Americans will learn some hard lessons: […]
Posted inFeatures
Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election?
In a pathbreaking study of the mass media and modern culture, The Image, first published in 1961, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event.” A pseudo-event, Boorstin wrote, is “not spontaneous … but planned, planted, or incited”–an event whose “occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media,” and whose […]
Posted inBooks
State of the Debate: The Rise and Fall of Racialized Liberalism
Liberalism took a fateful turn in the 1960s by redefining reform in racial terms. Two new books on urban politics sometimes overstate their case against recent liberal policies, but they help clarify what went wrong.