15th Anniversary

Liberalism is at greater risk now than at any time in recent American history. The risk is of political marginality, even irrelevance. And the reason is not just a shift in partisan control of the federal government. There has been a radical change in the relationship of ideology and power in America. Only by renewing […]

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” — Jon Lovitz playing Michael Dukakis, Saturday Night Live, October 1988 Why are we losing to these guys? On nearly every major issue, public-opinion polls show that the Bush administration and the Republican Congress are well to the right of the country. Yet George W. […]

The American Prospect began with a small circulation and great ambitions. Our aim was to rethink ideas about public policy and politics and thereby to restore plausibility and persuasiveness to American liberalism. The first issue appeared in spring 1990, a historical moment in some respects like today: Democrats had lost successive presidential elections, there was […]

In October 2001, I wrote a piece for the Prospect [see “Excusing Terror”] in which I criticized “the politics of ideological apology” — the excuses that some on the left were making for terrorism. No one was justifying terrorism, but we were often asked to “understand” it. I argued that terrorism as a political strategy […]

TODD GITLIN Professor of journalism and sociology, Columbia University Narrowly squeaking in under the 15-year limit is Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall (1991), which doesnft bring good news to liberals but is valuable for precisely that reason. Edsall has been […]

More than a decade ago, I began to explore changes in Americans’ civic engagement and social connectedness (for which I borrowed the term “social capital”) and the impact of those changes on our communities and our democracy. My initial findings, suggesting a remarkable decline in social capital nationwide, appeared in a 1995 article called “Bowling […]

“Are we really on a cliff by the sea, poised perilously above the waves and the rocks? Or are we in fact down by the beach, on a gentle slope of soft and agreeable sand?” “Can’t We Go Faster?” TAP, September 1997 I claim the best record of any economist to survive the […]

Back when I wrote “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts” for The American Prospect in September 1992, I was trying to get two ideas across: The middle-class society of the postwar era was unraveling, and the right was lying about it. It was a very straightforward exercise. My favorite figure was the graph showing […]

In “The Future of Black Representation” in Fall 1995, Carol Swain warned that racial redistricting was helping Republicans. She’s still warning Democrats. Can the Republican Party successfully attract a growing percentage of the black vote? Barring new embarrassing blunders, such as the Trent Lott fiasco of a few years ago, the answer is an unequivocal […]

In December 1992, according to Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, President-elect Bill Clinton was about to announce Laura Tyson’s appointment as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Tyson mentioned she and Robert Reich had debated in The American Prospect whether the nationality of a firm was important. Suddenly recalling the debate, Clinton said, “You […]