The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind. Two new books consider what liberals can learn from the decade.
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann is a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book is Transaction Man.
Posted inMagazine
The New Political Economy
In the immortal Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote, The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like […]
Posted inMagazine, March/April/May 2014
Tilting at Windmills
This column marks the dawn of the post-Charles Peters era of “Tilting at Windmills”; at eighty-seven, Charlie has decided to stop writing the column himself, and from now on a rotating cast of alumni of the magazine will be writing it. It’s appropriate that I am beginning the rotation, because I’m the one who, many […]
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Deconstructing Reconstruction
The tumultuous decade that followed the Civil War failed to enshrine black voting and civil rights, and instead paved the way for more than a century of entrenched racial injustice.
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Windmills, Revisited
reported for duty at the Washington Monthly on July 1, 1976. For the magazine, it was a time of economic distress (nothing new there) and psychological glee. Jimmy Carter, by then the certain Democratic nominee for president, was an actual subscriber to the Monthly, meaning that every year a renewal check came in drawn on […]
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What No Child Left Behind Left Behind
he biggest upward ratchet ever in the federal governments role in public educationhistorically a state and local functionand possibly the most significant piece of domestic social legislation since the Great Society is George W. Bushs No Child Left Behind law, which sailed through Congress in the spring of 2001. Perhaps because so many of them […]
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Long Good Buy
The conceptual rubric under which Cohen places all this comforting material is new, however: It’s the idea that the mid-to-late-20th-century United States became the first country to organize itself politically around the idea of its people as individual consumers. Consumerism, as she presents it, has its roots in the New Deal, but it took off […]
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The Outcast
I had a distinctly middle-aged moment when I picked up the galley proof of Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends. The publisher’s blurb on the inside cover says: “[T]his memoir of some of the key intellectual battles of the last 30 years offers a rare, firsthand portrait of the New York intellectuals—’American Bloomsbury’ as they have been called—by one of the few surviving members.” […]
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The SAT Meritocracy
Several years ago in these pages, I reviewed a book by E. Digby Bakzell, the sociologist of the American elite (he invented the term WASP), and heartily endorsed Baltzell’s observation that the old American “Protestant Establishment” (another term Baltzell invented) had been replaced by a new “SAT meritocracy.” I suggested that the rise of the latter […]
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It’s Not As Bad As You Think It Is
One of President Clinton’s main challenges in his second term is going to be trying to move the United States away from a self-conception as a nation in crisis. It’s a problem partly of his own making. In his 1995 State of the Union address, for example, delivered right on the heels of the big […]
