Advanced search

US War Crimes in Somalia

“In his foreword to Mogadishu! Heroism and Tragedy, Ross Perot wrote: ‘Read this book carefully. Never forget its contents as you watch the tv docu-dramas of smart bombs going down air shafts, where war is presented in a sterile, sanitized environment. Remember, war is fighting and dying.’ . . .” read more

Power in the Global Arena

“I would like to talk primarily about the United States, its place in the evolving world order, and the prospects for the future. The record of prediction in human affairs is not exactly inspiring, but the task is hopeless without at least a fair grasp of what has . . .” read more

Fosterites and Feminists, Or 1950s Ultra-Leftists and the Invention of AmeriKKKa

“‘It suffices but to mention the chauvinist ideology which still penetrates the core and culture of our national life, rendering many people susceptible to infliction from this social disease.’—Claudia Jones” read more

The Strategic Triad: The United States, Russia, and China

“The official end of the Cold War, marked by the growing incapacity and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, inevitably meant a reduction of us military expenditure. This had long been regarded as essential from a strictly economic point of view: the extraordinary prodigality of the . . .” read more

Confronting Neoliberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realipolitik

“The dominance of neoliberal policies in Anglo-American countries during the past two decades has not only had a profound impact on the character and programmes of major parties, but has also led to dramatic changes within the ranks of former Marxists and critical theorists. These former radicals now . . .” read more

Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics

“In a quiet office at a Washington think tank, a tract is composed on the biologically determined intellectual inferiority of blacks. Out on a Brooklyn street, as black demonstrators march through a segregated white enclave, the residents yell racist epithets. At an urban college campus in California, Latinos . . .” read more

A Minority of One: An Interview with Norman Mailer

“I think of you as someone who’s always been in the opposition, always a dissident, not just to the wider society but even in his own circles. I remember you once saying to me that you’d refined your dissidence, you could give it a name, you were now . . .” read more

Bosnia and the Revival of US Hegemony

“The primary concern of us policy-makers, Democrats and Republicans, since the Second World War has been ‘world leadership’. Where necessary and possible domestic issues have been subordinated to the overarching goal of constructing and sustaining us hegemony over allies, confrontation with adversaries and domination of clients. . . .” read more

A New American Politics: Who Will Answer the Invitation?

“Joel Rogers (nlr 210) has done the Left in the us a great service in pointing out that the current political conjuncture in the us ‘is the unstated invitation to progressive action, our opportunity to do some good.’ As Rogers argues, liberalism is dying, the . . .” read more

Sympathy for the Devils: Notes on Some White Guys in the Ridiculous Class War

“It seems like another era, though it was less than five years ago, when I was sitting around the Men’s Wisdom Council, grunting Ho with the guys, and studying their hodgepodge, Shake-and-Bake ‘traditions’ for a book I was writing on changing conceptions of white straight men. But now, . . .” read more

Haldeman’s Sixties

“H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s crew-cut Chief of Staff, was the man Nixon trusted most. That made him the most powerful person in the Nixon White House after the President himself. ‘If a historian had had a fantasy of knowing all that one man nearest to Nixon had known,’ . . .” read more

The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics

“Two generations after McCarthyism, the Hollywood Left has almost receded from living memory. Its principal figures now show up mainly in the obituary columns of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, their experiences with the blacklist reduced to a sentence or deleted entirely. The most politically . . .” read more

Mississippi Dreaming: On the Fame of John Law

“Du sein de ces froides abstractions, du sein de cet” read more

How Divided Progressives Might Unite

“Among us progressives, most discussion of domestic politics is taken up with descriptions of social problems—falling wages and rising inequality, retreats from racial justice, destruction of inner-city neighborhoods, environmental degradation, violence against women, the agonizing problems of urban youth. The inventory reminds us that current policies fail . . .” read more

Gruesome Gertie at the Buckle of the Bible Belt

“‘Ah got ta tell ya bad days are here. Bad days have come.’” read more

California Rages Against the Dying of the Light

“For several decades California has played a leading role in the United States and world capitalism, but things have taken a sudden turn for the worse after a period of brilliant growth. Now, at the end of the millennium, California is a microcosm of the national malaise, the . . .” read more

Why the Democrats Lost

“American pundits greeted both the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Republican capture of Congress last November as seismic convulsions in us politics. Clinton was congratulated for reuniting those middle-income whites who had regularly defected to the Republicans in presidential elections since 1968 with the . . .” read more

The Myth of Multiculturalism

“Multiculturalism, cultural diversity, cultural pluralism: in the United States few causes have won such widespread enthusiasm. These phrases kick off a thousand speeches and articles; they appear in hundreds of essays and books. Government officials, college administrators, corporate executives, museum curators, high-school principals—to name just a few—declare their . . .” read more

Explaining New York City’s Aberrant Economy

“While much of the us undergoes a halting recovery from the ‘contained depression’ of the early 1990s, America’s largest city has remained mired in its sharpest downturn since the days of Fiorello LaGuardia. New York’s unemployment rate—which spiked in January 1993 at 13.4 per cent—has continued at . . .” read more

Don't Confuse Me with Facts: Clinton 'Just Says No'

“The us Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders spoke the unspeakable at a press conference on 8 December 1993. She courageously suggested that the government look at the experience of countries that had decriminalized drugs. She said it was her understanding that in other countries the crime rate and . . .” read more

Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The Text as a Flag for Pax Americana

“Richard Rorty is in danger of attaining the sort of eminence which today is normally reserved for French philosophes. He is one of the few English-language thinkers whom defenders of postmodernism feel able to cite along-side the continental icons of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. He has been described, . . .” read more

'Win-Win' with Bruce Babbitt: The Clinton Administration Meets the Environment

“For the environmental movement in America the allure of the Democratic ticket in 1992 was not Bill Clinton. His record in Arkansas was poor. Tyson, the chicken mogul, had fouled the state’s rivers with an enthusiasm equalled only by his zeal for Clinton’s political well-being. Not fifteen miles . . .” read more

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: US Feminism Today

“Here is one picture of feminism and women’s experience in the contemporary United States: women advancing up the ladder in professions, public administration and management; making steady inroads into political office; changing attitudes and cultural images; winning legislation against discriminatory practices in education and employment; feminist scholarship transforming . . .” read more

The Dead West; Ecocide in Marlboro Country

“Was the Cold War the Earth’s worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years? The time has come to weigh the environmental costs of the great ‘twilight struggle’ and its attendant nuclear arms race. Until recently, most ecologists have tended to underestimate the impacts of warfare and arms . . .” read more

Who Killed Los Angeles? Part Two: The Verdict is Given

“The angels of Los Angeles are weary from too much smiling.” read more

Who Killed Los Angeles? A Political Autopsy

“It was the most extraordinary conjuring feat in modern American political history. The spring presidential primary season had barely opened when a volcano of Black rage and Latino alienation erupted in the streets of Los Angeles. Elite Marine and Army units fresh from the Gulf War had to . . .” read more

The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism

“Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal indicts race relations in the contemporary us as a system of what its publicity packet calls ‘de facto apartheid’. But its most chilling contribution to showing just how bad things are is an unwitting one. Unlike earlier . . .” read more

Waiting for the Rainbow Sign

“By midnight, no one phoning long-distance bothers with hello. Instead, they just ask, ‘Is it as crazy as it looks?’ I want to say, ‘It started long before all this . . .’ Long before this afternoon’s bewildering decision left me less astonished than strangely numb. Long before . . .” read more

White Identities

“Blackness has been an object of study for white people for a long time, an essential part of the project of constructing others, of naming, defining, marginalizing. The study of whiteness, however, has less of a history. There is a long tradition of blacks recognizing that race is . . .” read more

Domestic Incentives for the Gulf War

“Why did the United States fight the Gulf War? What factors entered into George Bush’s decision to avoid a negotiated solution? The timing of that decision goes some way to answering these questions, and two conflicting theories have been offered: first, that Bush wanted war from the beginning, . . .” read more

Why is the United States at War with Iraq?

“Why is the United States at war with Iraq? It is a lot easier to say what are not the reasons for us intervention in the Gulf than to provide a fully satisfactory account of its presence there. According to the Bush administration, the usa is . . .” read more

Trade Unionism in the USA

“These are difficult days for the labour movement in the United States, and the situation is even worse for the radical labour movement. Trade-union membership in the non-farm labour force has declined from over 30 per cent in the early 1950s to about 17 per cent today. The . . .” read more

A Reply to Staughton Lynd

“When Staughton Lynd told me that he was writing a review of both my book, An Injury to All, and David Montgomery’s, The Fall of the House of Labor, I quipped that he had put me in some fast company. After all, David Montgomery is not only an . . .” read more

Blacks and the US Constitution

“On 4 July 1854, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison addressed a large Independence Day gathering at Framingham, Massachusetts. One month earlier, a federal tribunal in Boston had ordered Anthony Burns, a fugitive from slavery, to be returned to his Virginia owner. Garrison had a long established reputation for . . .” read more

Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America

“Two years ago, a sports announcer in the United States lost his job because he enlarged indiscreetly—that is, before a television audience—upon his views about ‘racial’ differences. Asked why there are so few black coaches in basketball, Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder remarked that black athletes already hold an . . .” read more

America: Post-Modernity?

“Fredric Jameson understands the presence of [the] sedimented historical tradition when he argues that all works of popular culture have utopian dimensions that enable them to critique contemporary power relations. But even Jameson relegates the historical work of popular culture to a ‘political unconscious’, an uncomprehending desire to . . .” read more

America in the 1960s

“Last year’s anniversary of 1968, the high-water mark of the 1960s student radicalization, can only partly explain the outpouring of books by participants in the events. I suspect that most of these had been thinking about writing a book on the 1960s for some time, and that the . . .” read more

Between Bad Times and Better

“A familiar question in the Age of Reagan—when would the us Left revive once more?—had become by the last years of his regime the source of deep defeatism or, at least, nagging doubt. So much time had passed since the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, itself . . .” read more

The Jackson Moment

“Jesse Jackson woke up on November ninth to find himself the leader of the largest and most powerful political party in the Western capitalist world, and the front-runner for its Presidential nomination in 1992. It is an unwonted and unexpected role. The black Baptist preacher and Chicago community . . .” read more

Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer and the Rock

“‘Tonight we pick ’em up for anything and everything.’” read more

'Chinatown', Part Two? The 'Internationalization' of Downtown Los Angeles

“jake gittes: How much are you worth? noah cross: I have no idea. How much do you want? gittes: I want to know what you’re worth—over ten million? cross: Oh, my, yes. gittes: Then why are you . . .” read more

Marxism and Utopianism in the USA

“For more than a century and a quarter Marxism has occupied an important position in American social criticism, but never a dominant one. For most socialists between the 1870s and World War One, Marx had set forth primarily an analysis of the laws of capitalist exploitation and accumulation, . . .” read more

From the U-2 to the P-3: The US-Pakistan Relationship

“Not long after the U—2 surveillance aircraft was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approached Pakistan’s ambassador at a diplomatic reception and told him that he had looked carefully at the map, taken out a pen and drawn a big red circle round Peshawar. In . . .” read more

The Dollar Weapon: From Nixon to Reagan

“us international economic policy since the beginning of the seventies can only be explained as a reaction to the relative decline of the American economy vis-à-vis Western Europe and Japan. There is already an ample literature on the decline in us economic power, which is . . .” read more

Resurgent Democracy: Threat and Promise

“In ‘ “Resurgent Democracy”: Rhetoric and Reality’, nlr 154, Edward Herman and James Petras condemn us support for new democracies in South and Central America as hypocritical and opportunist. They also point out the wilful confusion involved in deliberately associating genuine democratization in South America with a . . .” read more

The Lesser Evil? The Left and the Democratic Party

“In the summer before the 1984 presidential elections, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, in a widely noted interview in the New York Times Magazine, boasted that ‘by now practically everyone on the left agrees that the Democratic Party, with all its faults, must be our main political arena’. . . .” read more

'Resurgent Democracy': Rhetoric and Reality

“During the past year Reagan administration officials and the us press have pointed with frequency and enthusiasm to a resurgence of democracy in Latin America. Secretary of State George Schultz, for example, has spoken of ‘more people voting in more elections in more countries than ever before . . .” read more

Surrealism and Patriotism: The Education of an American Novelist

“Would you tell us something about the influences which have formed you as a writer?” read more

Reaganomics' Magical Mystery Tour

“The re-election of Ronald Reagan will unleash new debate on the causes of the continuing conservative ascendancy in North America and Western Europe. Following in the well-worn grooves of discussions in 1980–1, some will stress the renewed importance of a reactionary-populist social discourse centred on ‘right to life’, . . .” read more

Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition

“The 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson represented a new stage of development in Afro-Americans’ struggle for equality in the context of us bourgeois democracy. Even white American political analysts unsympathetic with the Jackson campaign recognized this, and groped for words to define Jackson’s achievement. After Jackson . . .” read more