Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
IF POETRY, AS Wordsworth wrote, "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," political thought should take its origin from contention and anger similarly recollected. I suspect...
...On the other hand, the left has won many victories in the courts—on issues like civil rights, abortion, prison reform, capital punishment, and school funding...
...These are also reflections on the last election and the future of the left, written in the conviction that family and country are not the provinces of the right—not when we can rightly argue that we will do better by both...
...But we do need to step back a bit and think hard...
...I suspect that tranquility is in short supply among our writers, but still, we try in this issue to figure out what happened last November and how liberals and leftists should respond—and we try to do this calmly, quietly, thoughtfully...
...In terms of political effort, these victories have come relatively cheaply: they require nothing more than good lawyers and a smart brief...
...We have to argue about ways of reconnecting with those people: how to do it...
...is probably the central question in this issue...
...We begin a discussion of court politics here, with pieces on the role of judicial review and federalism in liberal and left politics...
...It is the least democratic branch, constitutionally protected against popular mobilization and frequently used to limit the success of social movements...
...n The judicial branch of government has always come a distant third in leftist political thought...
...n It is also the central question in the series of articles, continued here (and to be concluded in the Summer Dissent), on family values...
...The questions are urgent, of course, and we are hardly finished with contention and anger...
...And there are reasons to worry, too, about the morality of representing men and women whose consciousness is so different from ours...
...The recent discussions around the "death" of environmentalism provide a useful model: arguments that don't stop at posture and presentation but raise difficult questions about intellectual substance and political strategy...
...Sometimes, maybe, the claim is true, but it's probably never politically smart...
...But until we make that argument persuasively, until we agree among ourselves on what "doing better" means, we will never win again...
...But we should probably be a little apprehensive about the staying power of these kinds of victories...
...rather than, what ought to be done...
...n Also necessary is a debate, just beginning in the wake of Tom Frank's Kansas book, about the old idea of "false consciousness"—why does it happen so often that leftists claim to know more and to know better than the people they hope to represent...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
