A Website of the Radical Imagination
About Benj Demott We asked a number of First contributors to comment on the 2004 election. Our respondents came back to us at different moments during the campaign so we have dated their responses. No Half-Stepping By Lawrence Goodwyn This is the most important election in the country since 1936 and poses the same question: what kind of … Read more
William Greider tries to “explain power in plain English” to everyday people. But he’s always ready to learn from them as well. His new book, The Soul of Capitalism, calls attention to citizens whose businesses and working lives hint at how Americans might remake our society. While First of the Month will always be responsive … Read more
Wesley Hogan’s “Many Minds, One Heart” (Duke University Dissertation, 2000) stands as the freshest work on the Civil Rights Movement since Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Hogan’s dissertation is both a painstaking piece of scholarship and an urgent message to the grassroots. A natural democrat, Hogan identifies with everyday … Read more
I’ve been studying social movements for about 35 years and the more I study, the more I feel a distance between what I think I know and what is generally thought to be the essence of politics in this culture. And that distance keeps growing. George Bernard Shaw once said that when people learn something … Read more
At our editor’s request, I write in response to Eugene Goodheart’s essays Hamas’s Self-Destructive Leadership and What Israel Must and Must Not Do. I share what I take to be two of Mr. Goodheart’s premises: that both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to national self-determination, and that combatants are obliged to observe the laws … Read more
Coincident with the centennial celebration of the outbreak of World War I, I finished David Fromkin’s excellent A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Fromkin’s message, if I may paraphrase, is that since in took Western Europe 1500 years to get its … Read more
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears Take the rag away from your face Now ain’t the time for your tears —Bob Dylan 1. Dylan once praised Meir Kahane (a name that should be on everyone’s lips these days, if we don’t choke on it) and has been ventriloquized by Abe Foxman/Alan Dershowitz … Read more