Making Democracy Work in Bolivia

The struggle to build stable democracies in weak Latin American countries mirrors the Herculean task faced by fragile states in many other parts of the globe. Within Latin America, the fault lines between competing visions of the state, the economy, and national identity are particularly stark in Bolivia, which is divided along ethnic, geographical, and socioeconomic lines. That country's new president, Evo Morales, has the mandate that would permit him and his government to transform Bolivia in a way that would set a powerful example for countries throughout the region. The United States can and should support his efforts as long as they are designed to deepen and broaden the roles of democracy and a free-market economy in Bolivia.     

Red Dawn is Now: Race vs. Nation and the American Election

This article details the long-standing struggle within the American far right between those whose mission it is to resist the perceived subversion of international communism and its neo-Soviet successors now in power in the Kremlin and those whose mission is dedicated to preserving the White Race from the twin threats of miscegenation and marginalization from the corridors of power. Using the metaphor of the 1984 low-budget spectacular Red Dawn and noting the current pattern of Russian interference in the election and contacts with the Trump campaign, it traces the struggle from the ascendancy of anti-communism in the 1950s and 1960s to the current triumph of the race warriors and conspiracy theorists who championed the candidacy of Donald Trump. “Red Dawn Is Now” concludes with the observation that, for those who most fear foreign subversion, the revelations about Russian penwetration of the American election process and the Trump presidency represents a 21st-century version of the Soviet occupation that the young patriots of Red Dawn fame successfully repelled. If this is so, it suggests the possibility that Thomas Jefferson's observation that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants” may be prophetic and that the fifth wave of terrorism might at long last be at hand.     

Sexual psychopathy, public policy, and the liberal state

This article addresses several interrelated issues. It strives to situate a class of offenders within the liberal state. The disposition of this class allows an analysis of the tensions in liberal theory. It highlights the ways liberalism attributes individual responsibility for criminal behavior and captures the limits of those attributions. It also reveals liberalism's shift away from models of responsibility toward the social control of deviancy. The disposition of this class points toward the therapeutic mask involved in the social control model. Further, the disposition of this class may well serve as a model for isolating and demonizing other disfavored classes, including political dissenters.     

The narrative structure of policy analysis

This paper holds that the prior development of clear external criteria or principles is not always a useful avenue to the resolution of policy dilemmas, and that external criteria are sometimes as likely to emerge from proposed resolutions to policy issues as they are to govern those resolutions. In the absence of external criteria, stories meeting certain characteristics (truth, richness, consistency, congruency, and unity) can integrate necessary considerations, explain the development of current dilemmas, and point the way to resolutions. Not all policy analyses need to be in the narrative form-some analyses appropriately make tenseless arguments for particular principles. However, these principles invariably allow for many possible actions, and only a narrative can explain which particular course of action is desirable and why.     

Antecedents of deviant responses: Predicting from a general theory of deviant behavior

A statement of a general theory of deviant behavior asserts that four factors or processes intervene between the development of self-rejecting attitudes and adoption of deviant patterns. An earlier report demonstrated a relationship between antecedent negative self-attitudes and subsequent increases in seven variables that reflected these four factors. The present paper tests hypotheses that these seven variables are in turn related to the subsequent adoption of each of 22 deviant responses. Subjects were seventh-grade students (N=4694) who responded to questionnaires at T₁ and T₂ (a year later). The seven independent variables were measured by scale scores based on subject responses at T₁. Adoption of deviant responses was defined in terms of subject's selfreports of performing each of 22 deviant acts between T₁ and T₂ after having denied performance of the deviant act during a specified period prior to T₁. The results were interpreted as supporting the hypotheses, although relatively few exceptions were noted. These findings together with those of the earlier analysis were thus congruent with the theoretical position that the relationship between antecedent self-rejection and subsequent deviant responses is mediated by the subjective association of membership group experiences with feelings of self-rejection, the genesis of contranormative attitudes, the inability to satisfy the self-esteem motive through normative response patterns, and awareness of deviant alternatives to these normative patterns that in the past have failed to permit development of self-accepting attitudes.Received his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 1958. Current research interests are social psychiatry and, more specifically, the reciprocal relationship between self-attitudes and the adoption of deviant response patterns.