Dissent Magazine

Freedom Dreams - Dissent Magazine

Blacks In and Out of the Left by Michael C. Dawson Harvard University Press, 2013, 256 pp. Contemporary African-American scholars across the humanities and social sciences share a preoccupation with posing big questions about the dilemmas of black life in …

2 min read

The Black Church: From Prophecy to Prosperity - Dissent Magazine

The rhetoric last summer at commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington was quite different from that heard at the original march in 1963. Instead of celebrating the great march, the anniversary events sounded a plea for a new civil rights movement. Largely missing from that call, however, was the strong prophetic voice of black religion.

10 min read

Beyond Superwoman: Justice For Black Women Too - Dissent Magazine

By some metrics, African-American women are faring better than black men. They comprise nearly two-thirds of black undergraduates and a clear majority of advanced degree holders. But these numbers tell only part of the story.

8 min read

Brute Ideology - Dissent Magazine

Witchcraft and racecraft—unlike witches and race—are things that actually exist.

18 min read

Black Lives Matter in the South | Dissent Magazine

South Carolina has always been a battleground of larger, national campaigns for racial justice.

Scenes from the Front: France's Front National in Power - Dissent Magazine

Since March 2014, the Front National (FN) has governed eleven French municipalities. The photographs here, from a two-year reporting project on three of these FN cities, offer a glimpse of what a France run by the FN might look like.

3 min read

1% Museum: The Guggenheim Goes Global - Dissent Magazine

This year Gulf Labor’s newly formed direct-action wing—the Global Ultra Luxury Faction—has created a PR nightmare for the Guggenheim.

12 min read

Against the Technocrats - Dissent Magazine

Pundits fretting about a “tyranny of the majority” would do well to remember that democracy has always been a precondition of liberalism—not the other way around.

19 min read

The Uses and Abuses of “Neoliberalism” - Dissent Magazine

Neoliberalism has swallowed up too many meanings, making it harder to grasp the socioeconomic forces at loose today—and where viable resistance can be found.

18 min read

Parliament Square - Dissent Magazine

An excerpt from Parliament Square, first staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in October 2017.

You Can't Go Home Again - Dissent Magazine

It was an exercise in ’60s nostalgia. “Our time has come!” he shouted from the pulpits of black churches and the campaign stump. “Our time has come!” It was a cry reminiscent of the “Freedom Now” chant of the early civil rights movement, one …

Malcolm X as Icon - Dissent Magazine

It is a strange time, indeed, when a dead man is brought back from the grave to inspire the living. As far as we know, such an act of resurrection costs the dead nothing. It might even be a source …

The Rise of Solitary - Dissent Magazine

In the early 1990s Pelican Bay Prison was a cesspool of brutality. But in ending its worst years, did a judge civilize the cruel practice of solitary confinement?

Modern Family - Dissent Magazine

It is no accident that our age of hyper-capitalism is also one of aggressive “family values,” pursued in popular culture and legislation alike.

11 min read

Against Conservative Internationalism | Dissent

The EU provides a convenient villain for those eager to blame the rise of neoliberalism on unelected bureaucrats acting at the behest of capital. But if historians are correct, this account is a fable that distracts from a grimmer reality.

14 min read

A Botched Just War - Dissent Magazine

I have suffered much anguish over NATO’s war in Yugoslavia. Unlike almost every U.S. military intervention of the past half century, this is a just war—but badly and irresponsibly led. It was cowardly of the White House to decide on …

Choosing War - Dissent Magazine

At the heart of Nancy Sherman's "Afterwar" is a moral vacuum, in which the question of political responsibility persistently turns into one of moral injury.

14 min read

How War Lost Its Politics - Dissent Magazine

Election years used to be occasions for pitched battles over whether to go to war. Why aren't they still?

13 min read

Toward a Left Foreign Policy: Introduction - Dissent Magazine

The four articles in this section offer thoughtful, albeit contrasting, views about what liberals and radicals ought to say and do about the world outside U.S. borders.

Of Loopholes and Black Holes - Dissent Magazine

Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity is a vindication of the novel as a medium that allows time and space to serious considerations about how we organize our society and how we organize our lives. In the past thirty years our art has grown less serious and our politics more cruel. It has taken a novel of the artistic ambition and moral seriousness of A Naked Singularity to show us why this is no coincidence at all.

13 min read

The Coping Economy - Dissent Magazine

While constantly pushing their workers to do more with less, companies have found new ways of easing the pressure. Enter the mindfulness craze.

Anatomy of a Crisis - Dissent Magazine

To effectively counter the threat of authoritarianism posed by today’s crisis of democracy, we need to understand the dynamics that produced it. Introducing the special section of our Winter 2018 issue.

3 min read

The Trumpian Personality - Dissent Magazine

One of the crowning works of the Frankfurt School, The Authoritarian Personality has much to teach us about the age of Trump.

2 min read

Try Socialism - Dissent Magazine

Since Trump took office, a growing number of Americans have been willing to "try socialism," as a DSA hashtag puts it. The 2017 results show that a new generation of socialists is serious about translating this still amorphous interest into lasting power.

A Real Party of the People - Dissent Magazine

It's time to turn the Democrats into a truly democratic party—starting with a grassroots membership base.

2 min read

The Flagellates - Dissent Magazine

“While it is not within my power to outright abolish the standard sentence of fifteen corrective lashes, I can adjust how they are distributed. . .” A satire about prison conditions in Eritrea.

13 min read

American Apartheid - Dissent Magazine

In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein unveils how the federal government deliberately promoted housing segregation, deepening racial inequality and violating the Constitutional rights of millions of Americans.

12 min read

The Supreme Court’s Quiet Assault on Civil Rights - Dissent Magazine

The Supreme Court is quietly gutting one of the United States’ most important civil rights statutes. Only a movement can pressure Congress to act.

15 min read

Lana Del Rey’s America - Dissent Magazine

Trump’s election has made Lana Del Rey rethink her patriotism, without losing sight of a resilient, youthful Americana—and hope along with it.

11 min read

The Specter of Liberal Internationalism - Dissent Magazine

They present themselves as a policy vanguard. But think tanks like Brookings have become startlingly backward-looking and incapable of charting a new path for the United States in the twenty-first century.