During the final year of the reign of Bush and Cheney, the era of conservative dominance also appears to be stumbling toward an end. No administration has been so unpopular since the early days of disco. And the fall of Richard Nixon in 1974 was due primarily to the Watergate scandal, not to the accumulation of disastrous policies stretching from the levees of New Orleans to the streets of Baghdad. When his Texas protégé campaigned for president in 2000, Karl Rove predicted the GOP would hold power for decades to come. Clever activists on the Right would weld a durable...

When I was growing up in New York City, the view to the south of my parents’ apartment was dominated by the World Trade Center many blocks away. Towering above the rest of the landscape, they hogged the scene—as they did so many other views throughout the city—to such an extent that it was easy in some ways to forget they were there. On some level, they hardly seemed worth remarking upon; it was too obvious and they were too big. Now, of course, the buildings are gone, but their significance has grown enormously. And yet, they relate...

In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush declared the promulgation of freedom to be “the mission that created our nation.” Fulfilling what he described as America’s “great liberating tradition” now requires that the United States devote itself to “ending tyranny in our world.” Many Americans find such sentiments compelling. Yet to credit the United States with possessing a liberating tradition is equivalent to saying that Hollywood has a tradition of artistic excellence. The movie business is just that—a business. Its purpose is to make money. If once in a while the studios produce a film of aesthetic...

Immigration has convulsed and confounded American domestic politics these last few years, producing deeply divergent views about how to control America’s borders and how to treat immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the nation’s midst. That immigration has become so controversial is, in some respects, hardly surprising. In absolute terms, the number of immigrants residing in the United States—approximately 35 million—is at an all-time high. In relative terms, the density of the foreign-born population is approaching the peaks reached in the two previous waves of immigration, the 1830s to the 1850s and the 1880s to the 1920s. Moreover,...

Many hurdles stand in the way of the practical American Left—a left that actually has an interest in governing, not simply standing apart and denouncing the Empire. It must formulate itself not as a “they,” or even an “it,” but as a “we” whose solidarities are more intense and compelling than its internal divisions. It must overcome deficits that are deeply rooted in American history and highlighted by its absence from power in recent decades. It must find constituencies that are disposed by social position and mentality to take its ideas seriously, and win their allegiance. It must be...

Assessed from just about any angle, conservative ideology appears to be dominating the policy agenda in the United States. Even at a time when Republicans seem to be losing strength and Democrats have regained control of Congress, ideas about limited government, unfettered free markets, and strong families remain pervasive and influential in debates over everything from tax policy and business regulation to education reform and civil rights. In the United States, conservative ideology has been advanced by conservative politicians but, even more, by a conservative infrastructure of nonprofit organizations led by think tanks. Think tanks are independent, nonprofit, policy research...

To understand the state of the American Left, it is important to understand the context in which its resurgence is taking place, and the economic trends which are bolstering it. So this essay, though in sum about the coming years in American politics, will spend a substantial amount of time wandering through the recent past. Conservatism, after all, hasn’t failed. Rather, it has oversucceeded. And those successes—and the economy and society they’ve created—are sparking a profound counterreaction, which is both propping up a progressive movement that recently seemed near death, and forcing the whole country, Republicans included, to...

The welfare state in the United States had been under attack since Ronald Reagan was elected president almost thirty years ago. Since 1980, dismantling the welfare state has been at the center of the Republican Party agenda. In some areas, conservatives have made enormous headway. This is most apparent with their attacks on unions. The unionization rate for the private-sector workforce fell from more than 20 percent in 1980 to just 7 percent in 2006.

In other areas they have been far less successful. President Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security in 2005 was pushed back by a groundswell of...

In his 1986 bookFamily and Nation, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “No government, however firm might be its wish, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended polices or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense, concealed.”¹ As Moynihan knew, government policies have real effects on the lives of families, often producing unintended consequences. Sometimes this is the result, as Moynihan implied, of policymakers not fully understanding the scope of their actions. But, just as often, it can...

A labor victory depends on the definition of what it means to win. In 2008, the Democrats may well succeed in winning control of both Congress and the presidency. But the fact remains that a pro-union program is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism itself. This has been true for more than forty years, ever since the mid-1960s, when during the second of the two great surges of liberal legislation in the last century—the mid-1930s are the other one—labor saw civil rights, Medicare, immigration reform,...

One of the big, if unexpected, stories from the early stages of the 2008 campaign was the decline of the power of the Christian Right and the internal havoc it caused. Leaders of the once cohesive, vote-rich constituency were frustrated that neither abortion nor gay marriage seemed to stir GOP candidates or the voting public. Such prominent figures as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer even briefly threatened to bolt from their long-time political home and launch a third party. The abysmal approval ratings of George W. Bush, whose born-again moral convictions had earlier gained him solid backing from...