"John Rawls famously suggested that inequality can be justified under limited conditions," writes Daniel J.H. Greenwood: "if it makes the worst off better off than they'd be under more equal conditions. Paul Ryan's [Medicare] plan would reduce equality and make all of us worse off, and the worst off most of all....The real answer is pretty simple technically, if not politically." (Image: Justin Taylor / 2007 / Wikimedia Commons)

"It wasn't until the [Vietnam War] and the profoundly divisive passions it aroused cooled that Hollywood began to produce" ambitious films about the war, write Albert Auster and Leonard Quart. Hollywood arrived late to Iraq, but if the Vietnam films of the seventies and eighties are any indication, movies like "The Hurt Locker and Green Zone may be just the beginning of films that take a more critical look at the nature of the Iraq War." (Image: A still from Stop-Loss)

In a February speech on multiculturalism and Islam, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that "we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism." Tim Stanley warns that this new discourse "could replace the flawed compromise of multicultural liberalism with the tyranny of an artificial monoculture imposed from above," while Paul Berman insists that the best way to fight Islamism "is not by regarding it with a patronizing tolerance but, instead, by promoting the values of the liberal Left." The argument continues with a reply by Stanley. (Image: Anti-Ground Zero Mosque protests in 2010-David Shankbone/Flickr)

"Of all places in Afghanistan for a UN compound to be turned into a human abattoir, we're supposed to be shocked that it would be in the contented little metropolis of Mazar-i-Sharif...We're supposed to be astonished that the murderers of those seven UN workers arose from a frenzied mob at the head of a procession that started out at the city's famous Blue Mosque," writes Terry Glavin. "We should not be surprised at all." (Image: Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif; Michal Hvorecky/2010/Wikimedia Commons)

Colin Jones reports on the arrest of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and hundreds of other Chinese activists in the last two months, and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham updates her Winter 2011 article co-authored with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Interpreting Protest in Modern China." "The question of the moment," writes Cunningham, is "how to interpret the actions of a government whose fear of protest has settled so deep that its leaders are now seeking to silence people before they have begun to speak." (Image: Ai Weiwei; Ted Alcorn/courtesy of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry)

At his inauguration, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker broke with convention and "held his inauguration in a part of the capitol rotunda far from La Follette's bust, avoiding the possibility that he might be photographed sharing a frame with the progressive stalwart," writes Peter Dreier. "The revival of Wisconsin's radical spirit, so evident in the massive and sustained mobilizations in Madison, suggests that it will take more than these ceremonial logistics for conservatives to erase the legacy of Robert La Follette." (Image: La Follette bust in Madison; Ann Althouse/2011/Flickr)

Susanne Bier's 2010 Foreign Language Academy Award-winning film In a Better World "is the kind of film Hollywood loves to reward: virtuous, humanistic, manipulative, and shallow," writes Leonard Quart. "Africa is merely an exotic prop to serve Bier's theme. She has no real interest in that milieu or the desperate people who populate it."

"Of all places in Afghanistan for a UN compound to be turned into a human abattoir, we're supposed to be shocked that it would be in the contented little metropolis of Mazar-i-Sharif...We're supposed to be astonished that the murderers of those seven UN workers arose from a frenzied mob at the head of a procession that started out at the city's famous Blue Mosque," writes Terry Glavin. "We should not be surprised at all." (Image: Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif; Michal Hvorecky/2010/Wikimedia Commons)

"In my senior AP English class-comprised of the best students in the school-five students failed to achieve a passing grade last term," writes Ilana Garon. "Of these five students, one is pregnant, one just moved into a shelter with his family, one is currently bouncing between foster homes, and a fourth inexplicably left the country for three weeks in the middle of the term due to a mysterious family situation...[I]t's unreasonable to expect that these prob- lems can be completely circumvented by good teaching." (Image: United Federation of Teachers rally)

Progressive, pro-Israeli American Jews have, "out of a deep sense of anguish and despair," begun to openly discuss the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS), write Dov Waxman and Mairav Zonszein. Yet because it fails to distinguish between Israel and the settlements, "BDS makes a resolution of the conflict harder, not easier, to achieve." "But there is another option: a selective boycott against settlement products, not Israeli products or people in general." (Image: Poster supporting boycott of goods from Israeli settlements; Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Fabricant's Organizing for Educational Justice "serves as a sort of 'how-to' manual for mobilizing grassroots political activism in communities that are not often given a voice in their own governance," writes Ilana Garon. Fabricant "provides an inside look at the clockwork of democracy, and a call to arms for those seeking to bring about real infrastructural transformation in disadvantaged communities." (Image: a Bronx high school; Jim Henderson/ 2008/Wikimedia Commons)

"[T]he difficult truth is that a century after the [Triangle Shirtwaist Factory] fire, labor still has no sure footing," writes Greg Smithsimon. "If the arc of the universe tilts toward justice, it is only because we bend that way." (Image: aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire)

Michael Walzer dissents from the intervention in Libya: "...[T]he overthrow of tyrants and the establishment of democracy have to be local work, and in this case, sadly, the locals couldn't do it. Foreigners can provide all sorts of help - moral, political, diplomatic, and even material....But a military attack of the sort now in progress is defensible only in the most extreme cases. Rwanda and Darfur, where we didn't intervene, would have qualified. Libya doesn't." (Image: The USS Barry launches a missile into Libya; U.S. Navy)

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan were only the beginning of a crisis that is still unfolding. "We do not know the full extent of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima," writes Yascha Mounk. "One thing, however, is already evident: Japan, a liberal democracy, has responded to the crisis in what appears to be a shockingly misguided manner. And the constricting force of liberal pieties does seem, in part, to explain this failure." (Image: Fukushima nuclear facility)

"On Christmas Eve, 2010," writes Madhusree Mukerjee, "an Indian court sentenced Binayak Sen, a doctor who has for decades given medical care to indigenous people in forests of central India, to life imprisonment for sedition and conspiracy. Sen's real crime was to have investigated and publicized the forced expulsion, accompanied by killing, rape, torture, and house-burning, of about 350,000 aboriginal villagers in a state-sponsored campaign against Maoist guerrillas." (Image: Binayak Sen)

In the Summer and Fall 2010 issues of Dissent, Danny Rubinstein and Alexander Yakobson wrote about the decline of the Palestinian nationalist movement and the viability of a two-state solution. Here, the argument continues, with two responses to Yakobson by Rachel Lever and James B. Rule, and a reply from Yakobson. (Image: Security Wall; Justin McIntosh/Wikimedia Commons/2004)

"In the forty years of the human rights movement, no NGO has ever advocated revolution," writes Samuel Moyn. "Yet that is what is happening before our eyes....Of course, no one knows exactly whether 'rights talk' is prominent in Middle Eastern squares. But it seems certain that if 2011 is a blast from the earlier past, it is because its rights have not been those claimed by helfpul observers but ones arrogated by founding participants." (Image: March Revolution in Berlin, 1848)

Democracy "isn't triumphant" in North Africa, writes Michael Walzer - "not yet; the hardest fights lie ahead. The odds are not good - not because of any special features of Arab political culture, but because they are never good...Our friends can build on the excitenemnt of the last weeks, but hope and worry, together, are necessary for the next stage." Alan Johnson responds here, with a reply from Walzer.

“Recent rallies and protests in Iran proved that the Green Movement has not died,” writes Ramin Jahanbegloo. “The regime has based much of its international appeal upon being a righteous Islamic answer to corrupted regimes around the Middle East; now the government’s anti-democratic domestic policies are steadily sweeping away its legitimacy as ‘popular’ and ‘Islamic.’” (Image: Post-election protests in Iran; Hamed Saber/Wikimedia Commons/2009)

President Obama has announced the nomination of Scott Gration, the current special envoy to Sudan, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Kenya. “The choice of Gration would be a major error in conducting foreign policy in this critical East African nation, and in Africa as a whole,” writes Eric Reeves. “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee should not allow this nomination to go forward.” (Image: Sudan special envoy Scott Gration; Special Envoy's office/2009)