Politics of the moment

Quarterlies are often late to cover the politics of the moment, but sometimes we anticipate arguments to come. We carried important articles on torture in the Summer 2003 issue, and we have come back to it again and again in the years since—most recently in an online article by Lillian B. Rubin. We haven't yet discussed the question of how the country as a whole can best acknowledge and repudiate the Bush administration's policy on torture. That administration's more general abuse of executive power is the subject of Sanford Levinson's strong review essay in this issue. Dissent writers have argued about how other countries should reckon with their past; now we have an American reckoning to consider.