Jackson Lears

Peter Connolly thinks I want to ‘exonerate’ Ralph Nader for his role in the 2000 election of George W. Bush (Letters, 13 May). He is mistaken. For years I have been angry with Nader for his perverse insistence on contesting the race in Florida. But I do want to complicate the explanation for Gore’s loss, beyond a simple demonisation of Nader. Republican fraud and Supreme Court partisanship remain...

Clifton Hawkins provides me with an opportunity to clarify the ideology of ‘free labour’ that pervaded the North during the American Civil War (Letters, 30 June). Free labour involved more than the opportunity to sell one’s labour or the product of one’s labour; it also implied the promise of accumulating property through hard work, of becoming a self-made man. This ethos of success through...

Albion Urdank’s defence of NSA surveillance is confused and misinformed (Letters, 8 August). Urdank believes that Edward Snowden should have stayed and stood trial, just as Daniel Ellsberg did. Ellsberg himself disagrees, recalling that even after he was indicted in 1971 for espionage, theft and conspiracy, he was allowed out on bail and left free to speak at anti-war rallies throughout the country....

My evaluation of Hillary Clinton’s record was not an attempt to hold her to some impossibly high idealistic standard, as Tom McBride seems to think (Letters, 5 March). On the contrary: my aim was to take her exceptionalist world view seriously and to sort through its policy consequences using the available evidence. Her most prominent achievement, to take the most egregious example, turns out to...

Noam Chomsky is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. From the centre and the right he has been vilified for his alleged anti-Americanism, and from the left for his supposed complicity with Pentagon-supported research at MIT. Hilary Rose takes this latter tendency and runs with it, concluding that Chomsky’s putative failure to condemn all military-funded projects at MIT ‘helped take the...