Why Free College Is Necessary - Dissent Magazine
WEBWhy Free College Is Necessary. Higher education can’t solve inequality, but the debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to education discourse. Student debt activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 2014 (Light Brigading / Flickr)
Socialism from Above: Assessing the Cuban Experience
WEBCuban socialism has been a “socialism from above.”. Its features include supremacy of central power, the priority of the “official” truth, and limited possibilities for self-organization—qualities that have varied in importance in the post-revolutionary period, but that are demonstrably connected with one another.
How the Hart–Celler Act Changed America - Dissent Magazine
WEBHart–Celler was among the “Great Society” reforms enacted under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Because it eliminated the restrictive nationality-based immigration quotas that had prevailed since 1924, the law was widely heralded as an anti-discrimination measure. Yet as Coleman notes, “few of the bill’s supporters or opponents ...
What It Means to Be Liberal - Dissent Magazine
WEBMichael Walzer ▪ Spring 2020 The construction of the Statue of Liberty in Paris (Branger/Roger Viollet via Getty Images) . Is liberalism an “ism” like all the other “isms”? I think it once was. In the nineteenth century and for some years in the twentieth, liberalism was an encompassing ideology: free markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, a minimal state, radical ...
The Political Philosophy of Care - Dissent Magazine
WEBSarah Leonard is publisher and co-editor of Lux, a magazine of socialist feminism, a member of Dissent’s editorial board, and a contributing editor to the Nation.. Deva Woodly is an Associate Professor of Politics at the New School. She is the author of The Politics of Common Sense: How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (Oxford University Press, 2015 ...
Liberal or Social Democrat? - Dissent Magazine
WEBThere is another quip, the source of which I don’t know: a social democrat is a socialist who compromised with reality, whereas a liberal is an anarchist who compromised with reality. Liberals moved from defending free trade against the yoke of privileged protectionism in the nineteenth century, to promoting the active interference of ...
The Case Against Free College - Dissent Magazine
WEBThe main problem with free college is that most students come from disproportionately well-off backgrounds and already enjoy disproportionately well-off futures, which makes them relatively uncompelling targets for public transfers. At age nineteen, only around 20 percent of children from the poorest 2 percent of families in the country attend ...
The Ivory Tower Is Dead - Dissent Magazine
WEBThe Ivory Tower Is Dead. A discussion on the rise of the “UniverCity.”. New Haven Rising stages a projection highlighting Yale University’s tax break as a nonprofit institution on August 26, 2020. (Courtesy of New Haven Rising) Davarian L. Baldwin’s recent book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, offers an insightful examination—and ...
The New Black Internationalism - Dissent Magazine
WEBThe internationalism Du Bois advanced never fully dissipated. Even after the end of the Black Power era, forms of internationalism persisted. Black activists and intellectuals in the United States stood in solidarity with South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, in opposition to the Reagan administration’s interventions in Central America, and in defense of Palestinian liberation.
The Nativist Tradition - Dissent Magazine
WEBIn Denvir’s reading, just as waves of migration dramatically transformed America’s social terrain, so too did nativist ideology transform and adopt new rituals to justify and retain white power in the land of proclaimed universal liberty. Lee and Denvir’s histories of anti-immigrant politics are bracing but bleak.