THE FIRST 25 YEARS

...It certainly was "in the works" at least a year before this...

...whether it was in raising our voice, at a very early stage, against the insane policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations in Indochina...

...But surely the luminaries of the New Left have traced their • progress in flights too dizzying for any eye to track: between terrorism and capitalist apologetics—in the same decade, often in the same person—they moved far too cunningly for an alliance to be effected...

...We vaguely hoped that maybe there would be another year or two, but 25—good Lord...

...With a little more imagination, I think Dissent's editors would have joined the antiwar movement earlier and less reluctantly...

...and suddenly, as if to prove his sincerity, he pulled out a revolver and shot two wealthy and complacent-looking passersby...

...For in-fighters of the left, exTrotskyists and ex-Communists, they are surprisingly without rancor...

...I am waiting for the encore...

...Who knew in those days...

...In Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity, the psychoanalyst-author of a spurious political confession writes about a monastery staffed entirely by ex-Communists, where "each heretic believes that he alone broke [with the Party] at precisely the moment when the eau-de-vie of Communism changed to the ditch-water of absolutism...

...It is the beggar's cause, and the chief virtue it breeds in those who stand by it is patience...

...They have to turn in upon themselves, questioning first principles (their own), yet fighting angrily, fiercely the enemies who would annihilate those principles...

...The confessional etiquette of left-wing apostasy is about the same now as it was for Whittaker Chambers, and there are ideologueswithouta-party who can tell you the exact year, month, and day in which every manifestation of the American left became suspect...

...Above all, we saw it as our task, as the title of the magazine suggests, "to think otherwise," to use our critical judgment as a weapon to expose the pretensions, the obfuscations, and manipulative stratagems of those in the political and intellectual worlds who either had made their peace with the powers that be in the East or in the West, or who felt tempted, in what they conceived as the good fight against the Powers of Darkness, to claim that any means, no matter how antidemocratic or illiberal, might be used by the Children of Light...

...Such magazines don't brim over with confidence...

...For my part I can see nothing to regret...

...the packages and mail sacks were lugged to the nearest post office on our younger and then stronger backs...

...while we were at our best when, be it only in very broad strokes, we attempted to delineate the vision of a socialism with a human face...

...Year by year we shook off remnants of ideology, till we seemed to have nothing, at times, but the motivating ethic of socialism...

...For steadiness of resolve, consistency of principle, freedom from the cant of liberalism and socialism alike, Dissent has ranked high...

...What could they have in common with each other, let alone with Harrington...

...If you ask him about it, the beggar will tell you how much he misses the two extraordinary strangers, whose impetuous passage left his head spinning, and whose memory is like the flaring of a comet that nobody observes twice in one lifetime...

...It has been a good thing to do, and despite occasional grousing about the hardships of running a magazine on frayed shoestrings, I am glad we have done it...

...Whatever merit we have acquired must come from other sources...

...Yet survival is hardly meritorious in itself...

...On the larger question of their relations with the New Left, some of the editors have commented with a nostalgia touched by regret...

...The external forces behind the decision to go ahead were probably two-fold: first, McCarthyism and the desire to make some kind of a stand, given the actions of so many liberal and leftist intellectuals when confronted with the half-bluff, halfthreat of that obscene man...

...When we broached the idea to a number of our friends at a conference in New York, the response was heartening...

...Given the choice and the circumstances, I would do it again, despite all the limits and troubles that have been part of our work...

...Why in the bedroom...

...there were those coming from quite different backgrounds...

...All this was 25 years ago...

...0 For a quarter of a century now we have been putting out Dissent, so it seems right to ask, in some small informal way, what it has meant and why we have persisted...

...that a movement to be taken seriously requires the foundation of serious thought...

...When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine...

...but you remember that he's your best leaflet-distributor...

...The long exercise of patience fosters irony—a condition into which the editors are sometimes accused of having fallen...

...She said, "I love you...

...We need to persuade that socialism is a vital problem, not an easy certainty...

...Whether it was fighting against McCarthyism and the pusillanimity and cowardice of many who abetted him...

...Then, one splendid morning, the beggar's routine was disturbed by the approach of a handsome stranger (dressed in a denim jacket and cowboy boots...

...a tactic reserved for special occasions] than everyone in this room put together...

...Its origins were humble indeed...

...Who on that account would choose to surrender it...

...In the stability of its connection with the beliefs on which it was founded, Dissent remains, despite its age, the most youthful of journals...

...A magazine like Dissent, started out of a need for reconsidering and reviving a political idea, is not likely to have an easy time of it...

...we parted company with him when he suggested that civil liberties should be reserved for the virtuous, with the voice of the sinful to be stilled...

...He seemed prepared to assist at the speedy burial of the magazine...

...Sometimes—though to be frank, not too often— younger writers or students of mine express a measure of admiration for my having manned the ramparts for such a long time and under what, they 4 think, must have been trying circumstances...

...in its own way, the 25th anniversary of Dissent must certainly be reckoned among these...

...Perhaps more important than this question is the fact that in addition to those who had been together for some time (Socialist party, one or another grouping of the Trotskyist movement, etc...

...q 2 First, a parable...

...They seem anxious, sometimes distracted, perhaps even boring...

...Curiously enough, the explanation is "political" and reflects the times...

...But in fact, when I think back to these years, what sticks in my memory is not the occasional strains, tensions, even sacrifices, that have come my way when helping to edit the magazine, but the sheer pleasure that I derived from doing it...

...Yet the idea that had first brought us to the sect seemed still to matter, far from exhausted, open to renewal...

...But there was also a first review of the magazine in the pages of Commentary in which Nathan Glazer, then on the first leg of his long and tortuous trek from youthful radicalism to "responsible" neoconservatism, suggested that Dissent "is an unmitigated disaster as far as what is left of socialist thought in this country is concerned...

...with a swagger and a smile, the stranger said to him, "I'm with you...

...But the name hardly matters...

...Others among us came from different places, some independent writers and intellectuals drawn to the idea of socialism or the need for criticism...

...Well, we hoped he would be wrong, but that he turned out to be that wrong, we would not have believed in our fondest dreams...

...Gunsandbutter," the terrible slogan of those years, was in fact possible economically but not psychologically: the suspension of conscience that was needed to fight an evil war abroad would eventually make itself felt at home, and fortify the unembarrassable selfishness of our political atmosphere today...

...Dissent is a loosely-bound fraternity of readers and writers who agree on the worth of something our masthead calls "democratic socialism...

...But there is nothing—well, almost nothing—I found I was actually ashamed of having written or helped publish...

...But what these critics counted as a failing, I am inclined to count as among our more significant achievements...

...We did not believe that present-day society is sufficiently just to warrant a relaxation of criticism...

...What first attracted me to Dissent was Michael Harrington's "Why We Need Socialism in America," a work of persuasion remarkable for its coherence, and still more for its eloquent refusal of stock rhetoric...

...Still, the beggar admits that the fellow who sits beside him in the afternoons is tolerable company, and between them they get a little more than the beggar could have got alone...

...Looking at the table of contents for that issue, I found, among the names of editors and contributing editors, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Harold Rosenberg, Erich Fromm...

...The Vietnam War haunted the waking life of a generation: Dissent did not see why this should be so, hence assumed it was not so, and, notwithstanding Joseph Buttinger's conscientious essays, treated the war as a secondary issue...

...This, to be sure, is not enough for socialists, especially if that criticism comes to seem self-subsistent...

...It now seems to me that a first principle shared by all of them, and foreign to the usual conduct of political discourse, was—to adapt a phrase of Goodman's—the proper coalescence of the utopian essay with the practical proposal...

...Agnosticism of this kind is possible only to those who have not mistaken a wholly personal will to power for the universal quest for justice...

...Without putting myself in either camp, I note that those who employ irony in defense of a principle are at least proof against the veerings of the fanatic and the caprices of the fellow-traveler, to say nothing of the principled bigotry that overtakes so many well-meaning "left" publications...

...0 Anyone who would have suggested to Irving Howe or to me in the early months of 1953 that the magazine we had begun vaguely to talk about—it eventually became Dissent—would last for 25 years would have been treated by us with a measure of solicitude for his mental balance...

...And thinking in common can have unforeseen results...

...WHEN I LOOK over old issues of the magazine and reread what my friends and I wrote a decade or two ago, I sometimes cannot refrain from smiling broadly at the mistakes we made, the crudity of our expression, the failures of predictions...

...Certain of them might admit the truth of the charge sorrowfully, others gleefully, with Baudelaire's triumphant cry: "Guilty—guilty on all counts...

...The main thing was those articles that perhaps only a minority of our readers read, the articles that tried to reach back to the sources of the troubles of socialism and to suggest how we might think about such matters in ways that are clearer, more honest, more humane...

...He kept his promise, and, as the months and seasons passed, he and the beggar had plenty of talks, which the beggar found alternately tedious and "intriguing...

...In this respect, a characteristic moment in the history of Dissent is the early exchange between Fromm and Herbert Marcuse—after the appearance of Marcuse's attack on Freudian 8 revisionism—with Fromm, I take it, arguing the skeptic's cause, and pointing out that Marcuse is free to regard love as an expression of ideological superstructure only because he is unconstrained by the experience of any therapeutic practice whatever...

...I am sure that the other editors feel the same way...

...The passion of doubt and the doubt of passion, the return to the start and the defense of the ideal behind the start: such paradoxes, never likely to stir great applause, have kept us going...

...There was once a beggar named Equality, who rattled his cup to every passerby, and got a meager subsistance from the few poor coins he gathered here and there...

...Now it seems that we have in America a new possibility for at least a modest revival of a socialist movement...

...You may want to kill that skeptic...

...The older editors of Dissent, whose presence still dominates the journal, appear to take a less severe view—let us call it an agnostic view—of their own past and of the trappings in which their cherished ideals once found expression...

...We had agreed not to begin unless we had funds to sustain the effort for at least one year...

...It was, I believe, for a brief period during the 1960s, low on imagination...

...Some months later, when the first issue dated Winter 1954 would appear, the initial mailing of some 2,000 copies was handled in that same bedroom...

...If memory serves me right, there were some 50 persons at that conference, practically all of whom promised to contribute articles or 3 money, preferably both...

...True, Mailer contributed to the magazine a dystopian sketch of "the white negro," and after unveiling his creature told all who came to look: "Love him, for he is your future...

...We tried to avoid the selfrighteous certainties of the sectarians, while not succumbing to the lures of so-called pragmatists who lost any vision of worthwhile goals in the sheer joy of manipulating means...

...For whatever else, we were not content with the given...

...Where Dissent began does not have the importance of how and why, but has at least the advantage of being easier to answer...

...In the modestly furnished bedroom of our family's newly rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, offBroadway, on the fifth floor...

...Some of the most significant rewards of my life have come from my work on Dissent...

...And here I would like to suggest, at the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, that throughout the years, and despite many errors and mistakes, we succeeded, by and large, in being a voice of sanity and conscience on the left...

...We most often went wrong, in my judgment, when we attempted to take stands on specific policies of the moment...

...The task of raising this sum—I think it was $6,000—proved difficult...

...I feel what the young Wordsworth felt about a much more significant political event in his lifetime, that "it was a joy to be alive" in those days...

...Moments of high drama aside, most editorial disputes are settled with a joke, or with the untoppable retort: "If you really think so, put it in writing and we'll publish it...

...and second, what do you suppose is the average income of the policemen manning the barricades...

...One day he was joined by a more or less respectable-looking man (wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase), who promised to keep the beggar company and gather coins with him, from three till six every afternoon...

...Actuarial tables being what they are, it is to be expected that the ranks of us graybeards will soon be thinned, as they have already begun to be...

...So you end up pleasing only a small number of people, and even them only provisionally, quizzically, with an odd passion of doubt...

...I recall vividly the moment when the first copy came from the printer...

...We need to pass on to our younger friends not so much a particular crux of opinion as a ranging style of criticism...

...And perhaps they will see the relevance to their enterprise of one of Hazlitt's reflections on youth: "A person who forgets all the sentiments and principles to which he was most attached at nineteen, can have no sentiments ever after worth being attached to...

...The first issue of the magazine, in the winter of 1953-54, elicited a good number of favorable comments...

...yet we wanted thereby to hold fast to the socialist vision, to give it new strength and value...

...We certainly didn't think of that...

...Which particular exchange of letters among old political friends and associates can be said to have sparked the idea of Dissent...

...They cannot gleam and shine, as some would like...

...Some of us rebelled against the sterility and suffering of life in a political sect: it seemed to do no good and besides, we could no longer bear it...

...you're wonderful," and, as if to prove her sincerity, she placed in his cup a check for $100 (which he spent more quickly than you might assume), and added as she waved goodbye: "I'll mention you at the Academy Awards...

...When we first discussed the matter in my living room in Wellesley, we felt obliged at the height of the McCarthy period to create a journal in which we could freely express our dissent from the abysmal political and intellectual atmosphere, a place where we would be unhampered by the cowardice and caution of what passed at the time for the left-of-center press...

...It is sometimes forgotten that Mailer also contributed a critique of the liberalism of David Riesman, and several shorter essays in his most workmanlike vein...

...But younger authors and editors have steadily been attracted, and who knows, there may still be a few happy anniversaries in the future of Dissent...

...second, an intense dissatisfaction with the existing political, socialist, and leftist organizations...

...The genial title Dissent would be the contribution of Lew Coser—editor Bernard Rosenberg having destroyed the attractive notion of naming the magazine No...

...We were sometimes criticized for allegedly being "predictable...

...those who broke before him he regards as renegades, those who broke after, as charlatans...

...We thought all would be well if we could manage to put out four issues for the year 1954...

...The next day, a beautiful and glamorous stranger (not at all as made-up as you might think) separated herself from the noontime rush and embraced the beggar warmly...

...with the quip that it would be too "affirmative...

...We printed some of C. Wright Mills's most significant essays, but we turned against him when he listened with admiration to the appeals of Castro...

...We survived...

...Dissent is helplessly, inevitably—at times cheerfully—in the position of the skeptic at a leftwing meeting, who raises his hand to remark, at the moment of maximum uplift and solidarity: "I don't object to storming the barricades: but first, how many demonstrators can you count on...

...some time in the winter of 1953, on a cold and bleak wintery day...

...But brilliant articles, desirable and hard to come by as they are, were not for me the main thing...

...All this time, the more or less respectable-looking man had been keeping the beggar company from three till six every afternoon...

...However well or poorly we did this, for me it was the central purpose of the magazine...

...or whether it was in criticizing the suicidal tactics, the mindless activism of certain Kamikaze fighters of a New Left that was about to disintegrate, we always attempted, no doubt sometimes without succeeding, to define a radical perspective that remained true to the democratic and fraternal vision of those for whom socialism was the image of their desire...

...But starting a magazine is also doing something: at the very least it is thinking in common...

...whether it was in support of the civil rights movement and the early stages of the New Left...

...He was clapped in prison and the beggar never saw him again...

...Yet every time I soon felt that stilling the voice of Dissent would mean so significant a loss in the beleaguered camp of the radical and socialist left, it would be irresponsible to give up the fight...

...Sociologists like to speak of the unanticipated consequences of social action...

...The saving remnant are ensconced in government and university jobs, evolving new dialectical modes...

...Having gone to school in New Left circles, where "commitment" preceded "action" by a few minutes at most, I found Dissent's emphasis on argument, definition-by-contrast, and the subdivision of all friends into friends and enemies, positively refreshing...

...There have been moments when I have thought, though only fleetingly, that it was perhaps time to cease publishing the magazine, that we had done what we could and the torch might now pass into other hands...

...For a long time, we could do little but engage in the fundamental intellectual activity of social criticism...

...but he never saw her again...

...We provided a platform for Herbert Marcuse when he engaged in principled debates with Erich Fromm on psychoanalysis and politics...

...Yet, just because there is such a possibility (who knows how strong...

...I hope the magazine can keep going for a few more years...

...Yet, there are moments when patience is all, and stubbornness too...

...A sectarian qualm having once arisen concerning the pages occupied by a foreign contributor, the Editor firmly announced: "That man has more intellectual distinction [drawing out intellectual to six syllables...

...q 9...

...Let the founders of Dissent accept this as a sufficiently modest compliment...

...in fact, his review was kindly intended to shorten our death throes as much as possible...

...and there's a suspicious rumor that he wrote all the leaflets himself...

...She did...

...I recall a few sentences from Harold Rosenberg: "The weapon of criticism is doubtless inadequate...

...With a bit of luck and help, they will keep us going a while longer...

...Over the years we have printed some brilliant writers, some first-rate pieces: Silone and Mailer, Chiaromonte and Tertz, Swados and Lichtheim, Heilbroner and Lekachman, Pachter and Harrington...

...The magazine arose out of the decomposition of the socialist movement in America, or what little was left of it by the early '50s...

...To borrow one of the better phrases of the young, we have done our thing...

...Because they were in love with ends rather than means, they could "discover the truth" about left-wing politics and yet refuse to discard their ideals as wreckage...

...In this I may be accused of sheer perverseness...

...We had rented out a room in the apartment to a young woman, a teacher and a stranger whom we did not want passing through the living room while the formation of a magazine called Dissent was under discussion...

...Not for us the wild fluctuations of ideas of those, always in quest of some novelty, who in rapid succession moved from one political position to its opposite: from heroic revolutionary postures to positions in the Washington bureaucracy, or from civil-rights activism to publicity for George Meany and the revival of the Cold War...