If we are realistic and appropriately modest, television can enhance democratic deliberation.
Books, Culture & the Arts
Passion, Memory, and Politics, 1992
F rom its founding nearly three years ago, The American Prospect has sought to help reconstruct a plausible and persuasive liberalism. This issue’s cluster of articles concerned with a public investment strategy for economic growth exemplifies that purpose: substantive, detailed thinking about how to solve the nation’s problems, rather than symbolic gestures. Yet, as this […]
The Limits of Indignation
Three widely discussed works are helping to heat up the debate about race again. But the limits of a politics of racial conscience should be all too apparent.
The Fractured Family
Some observers are celebrating post-modern families as a positive break from the traditional form. Others are calling for a restoration. Are those our only choices?
The Reconstruction of Rights
Too many Americans today think of rights solely as limiting their obligations to others and responsibilities as citizens. But rights, rightly understood, flourish only when democracy flourishes, too.
Delectable Materialism: Were the Critics of Consumer Culture Wrong All Along?
It takes an immigrant, or a Soviet visitor, to celebrate the culture of consumerism. Why, as a nation, are we so eager for material improvement, yet so skeptical of materialism?
The Cultural Enemy Within
In the past year, the opinion has gained currency, particularly in conservative circles, that the great ideological battles of our time are shifting to the terrain of culture. The controversies over free speech and the arts; multiculturalism and education; the relevance of gender, race, and class to the study of the humanities and society; the […]

