As the 2000 election campaign approaches, it appears that the 30 Years' War in American politics is over and the spirit of the '60s has won--not the radical '60s, now broadly condemned by the right, but the liberal early '60s. The belated triumph of the tradition of '60s liberalism is one of the remarkable political … more
Last November, when George W. Bush
became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas ever to win El Paso County,
some local Democratic officials consoled themselves by wondering what might have been, had
Texas politics not lost former San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros to personal scandal.
During the 1980s, Cisneros not… more
Today it has
become commonplace to observe that we live in a post-industrial society in which the old
ideologies of left and right are moribund. None of this was obvious in 1973, when Daniel
Bell published "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social
Forecasting." Reissued by BasicBooks, with a new,… more
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that in democratic
nations, each new generation is a new people. The constant change and agitation of a
democratic society, he contended, weakens the ties binding one generation to the next,
enabling each new generation to refashion the world in its likeness.
On June 8, L.A. voters elected their first two officials from the post-baby-boom
generation. Next month, Alex Padilla,… more
Through the smoke of villages burned by Serbs in Kosovo and cities bombed by
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization across Yugoslavia, a conflict over the
basic norms of world order can be discerned. The U.S. and its allies claim that
the right of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo to a high degree of self-determination
justifies foreign interference in Yugoslavia's domestic affairs. Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic insists this is an invasion of… more
The Greek physician Hippocrates wrote that
Scythians, the nomadic people whom the Greeks considered the "barbarians" of
their time, all looked alike. The Greeks, by contrast, were heterogenous in stature and
shape.
Hippocrates certainly wasn't the first person to caricaturize and homogenize other
peoples. While adjectives and epithets have varied, there is a constant in all such
characterizations: The "civilized" pride… more
At first glance, few would
have predicted that the campaign for the District 1 seat on the L.A. School Board would
wind up racially charged. After all, two-term incumbent Barbara M. Boudreaux and her
opponent, Southern Christian Leadership Conference director Genethia Hayes, are both
African American. Yet, as much as the campaign is about differing approaches to
representing one of the lowest-achieving districts in… more
The mini-furor that erupted over Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa's naming
of Ron Unz to a blue ribbon commission on state and local finances petered out
Wednesday with a tiny protest outside the speaker's office in Sacramento. Around
10 demonstrators chanted and held up placards calling the speaker a traitor.
The organizer of the event reiterated her charge that Villaraigosa's appointment
of the author of the anti-bilingual education ballot initiative to… more
The decision by Councilman Richard Alatorre not to
seek reelection opens the door for a new generation of Eastside leadership in the 14th
District. All the attention paid to his district and the race to succeed him can only be
good for local politics. Last week, an unprecedented 19 candidates declared their
intention to run. Unions, which have played a pivotal role in augmenting Latino political
… more
