AT FIRST GLANCE
Walzer, Michael
The first issue of Dissent appeared 30 years ago this month. Some weeks after reading it, I went home from Brandeis University, where Irving Howe and Lewis Coser were then teaching, and told my...
...Some weeks after reading it, I went home from Brandeis University, where Irving Howe and Lewis Coser were then teaching, and told my parents that I didn't want to be a lawyer, I wanted to be an intellectual...
...Nor was the national response to the sit-ins all that apathetic...
...In Dissent, we demonstrated our disbelief in both of them, or our reluctance to believe, by the eagerness with which we looked for and celebrated every sign of resistance to tyranny in Eastern Europe and of political activism among oppressed or excluded citizens in the United States...
...Still, the critical pieces turned out to be right and, even among solid citizens on the left, the messengers were blamed for the bad news...
...It was a pessimistic theory, but for me it was exhilarating...
...What is today called neoconservatism has its authentic origins in those years...
...0 One of the greatest political virtues is the readiness to do the same things over and over again...
...But early readers and young writers like myself had a somewhat different view...
...The Montgomery bus boycott was more joyously welcomed and more deeply reflected upon in Dissent than in any other American magazine, and it was literally on the first day of the black student sit-ins, in January 1960, that Irving Howe telephoned to ask me to go down to North Carolina...
...0 If democracy was the positive argument of those years, mass society was the "critical theory...
...I was one of them (and in an important sense still am...
...Perhaps for that reason, I was slow to see the destructive tendencies endemic to populist politics— whose protagonists "go to the people," ideology in hand, more ready to represent their own convictions than the actual men and women they encounter...
...Much of the reputation of Dissent, even today, is shaped by our own response to the new leftism that grew out of the early civil rights movement: the 3 student populism, the narodnik passion of SDS...
...Soon enough, the New Left produced its own vanguard and then its rival vanguards, at war with one another and with all the rest of us...
...nor should we...
...Mass society was the liberal (and infinitely preferable) version of totalitarianism: in the one case radical atomization, in the other radical mobilization...
...It is still necessary to explore, hopefully and skeptically, the possibilities for a leftist renewal...
...The image of the '50s as a nonpolitical time is only partially accurate...
...It is a virtue that one begins to respect at about 30, and Dissent at 30 embodies it—we have little choice...
...I don't think that I told them that what I really wanted was to be a left-wing intellectual...
...It was not a time of mass movements or of visible social unrest, but in the history of political ideas and ideologies the years that stretch from the debate over McCarthyism to the North Carolina sit-ins were both important and exciting...
...our program...
...Both theories, I now think, told more than the truth...
...It is as necessary now as it was in the '50s to make the case against conservatism, and if the world is harder for conservatives these days, it is harder also for democratic socialists...
...q 4...
...Curiously, the intellectual legacy of the New Left of the '60s—a result more of its social location than its political inclination—is a kind of academic Marxism, sometimes lively and enlightening, sometimes scholastic and wearying, focused more on the past than the present or future...
...But the deep structure of conservative thought in a liberal society, market ideology at home and hard-line anticommunism abroad, was first put together in the '50s...
...Those were days of meetings, negotiations, Those were days of meetings, negotiations, polemics, friendships made and lost...
...All those people, politically apathetic, wrapped up in their private lives, eager consumers, watching television— didn't I know them...
...We have not published much in that mode...
...This was a leftism liberated from the Marxist sects of the Depression years but without, for the moment, any sort of popular base: a critical and worried but also an engaged and adventurous leftism...
...The Port Huron statement was written largely out of our pages, and we vigorously debated the theory and practice of community organizing, printing supportive as well as critical pieces...
...And partly in response to McCarthy, and the Cold War, and the conservative celebration of American capitalism, a new kind of leftist thinking also had its beginnings in the '50s—most importantly, though not only, in the pages of Dissent...
...I would feel easier about this view if I thought that our sympathy and understanding could have altered the end of the story...
...there are other leftist magazines...
...hadn't I grown up in an American suburb, the unexpected home of the masses?—were now accounted for...
...Without the Vietnam War, the worst forms of revolutionary posturing and political violence would probably have been avoided...
...What should our vision be...
...Our task today is what it has been: to carry on the democratic argument, to watch for signs of popular activism and insurgency, to struggle with the dilemmas of choice and policy...
...For some of us, at least, those were heady days...
...What I found there was nothing at all like a mass society...
...Article after article stressed the crucial importance of democracy, civil liberties, oppositional politics, citizen activism, decentralization—themes that opened the way for, and played into, what was soon to become the more or less official ideology of the New Left, participatory democracy...
...we failed in sympathy and understanding...
...We were too critical, it's often said...
...Faced with the New Frontier and the Great Society, the conservatives went into hiding, went underground—at a time when the symbolism of the underground was seized and exploited, inappropriately, by the left— only to emerge, somewhat soured and occasionally rancorous, after the '68 elections...
...Localism and participation always had their advocates in Dissent...
...It is often said that Dissent in its first years sustained the socialist tradition through a had time...
...That was, I suppose, one of the purposes of the founding editors...
...Someday, there will be a newer left, and we will be supporters and critics: intellectuals still...
...I thought that what was going on in the magazine was the re-creation, even the reinvention of socialist ideas and the reestablishment on new (non-Marxist) grounds of the democratic commitments that the left had honored, too often, only in the breach...
...In fact, we played the role we should have played: we provided a forum for ideas, programs, controversies...
...our organizational structures and strategies...
...Reading the descriptions of mass society, I first learned the explanatory power and the intellectual temptations of a general proposition...
Vol. 31 • January 1984 • No. 1
