The new liberal journals

...In the 1960s the absence of those solidaristic pressures produced the dubious social engineering of "the best and the brightest...

...Reconstruction is concerned with some of the same issues as the American Prospect...

...But the Reagan years quashed that dilemma and the American Prospect is free to deal with the political realities...

...The editors describe the American Prospect as a "journal for the liberal imagination," though, priced at a hefty $7.95 per copy and written in a style only an issues analyst could love, it's more likely to be a magazine for policy experts and their political clients...

...The editors, both of whom were associated with the magazine Working Papers, a 1970s attempt to create a left-liberal counterpart to the Public Interest, seem likely to be more successful this time...

...Intellectual magazines both stimulate and signal political changes...

...In the 1960s the New York Review of Books heralded a swing left from which it later veered away...

...By featuring such venerable liberals as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...What's missing from the American Prospect is an explanation of why the very term liberalism has come to be seen as an epithet equated with elitism...

...It is, in short, the first fully post–New Left liberal journal...

...In "The Real Welfare Problem," Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin use new survey research to go beyond the current debate over workfare versus welfare "rights...

...Galbraith agrees, and in an essay whose rather arrogant tone is symptomatic of why liberalism collapsed, he finds no fault with himself or his colleagues or their politics but blames everyone from the public to political consultants for the liberal downfall...

...But the reformist and authoritative social science of the 1960s has been replaced with what might be described as forensic social science...

...Together with the American Prospect we have another new journal, Reconstruction, edited by Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy and meant to serve as an intellectual center for the black community...

...That means the issue is not work versus welfare but how to aid the working poor through a variety of tax and mortgage credits...

...In the wake of the HUD scandal, Peter Dreier and J. David Hulchanski describe Canada's success in using government subventions to successfully support low-cost housing built by private, nonprofit builders...

...Diverse in style and tone, its articles range from Stephen Carter's intriguing memoir, "The Best Black," a critique of affirmative action from the perspective of a black intellectual, to Peggy Davis's distinctively left-wing piece on inner-city social breakdown, which has the temerity to praise the Moynihan Report...

...The birth of the National Review in the mid-1950s was a catalyst for the conservative movement that followed...

...But Reconstruction, operating on a far more modest budget than the American Prospect, is primarily, though not exclusively, a magazine devoted to opening up debate about AfricanAmerican issues at a time of resurgent black separatism...

...Its article on "The Politics of Cooperation at the Workplace" could fit comfortably in either...

...and John Kenneth Galbraith in its first issue, it also signals that it's a magazine that will attempt to revive the liberal tradition that broke down in the 1960s...

...This is more than a matter of mere intellectual curiosity...

...When Adlai Stevenson, the political godfather of postwar liberalism, was complimented on having educated the voters during one of his losing campaigns, he set the style for a new upscale liberalism by replying, "Yes, but the voters flunked the course...

...Pollster Stanley Greenberg's article, "Reconstructing a Democratic Vision," suggests that taxpayers want and are willing to pay for more activist government policies on poverty, education, and the environment...

...So we welcome both the American Prospect and Reconstruction to the ranks of struggling but vital small magazines of opinion...

...The appearance of these new journals doesn't guarantee such changes but does serve the essential function, as in the Jencks-Edin article, of creating the straw out of which the bricks for a new, more viable liberalism can be laid...

...When the Public Interest began in 1965 it walked with confidence onto a largely empty playing field...

...The separation is so severe that even after a decade of being shut out of the White House, the Democratic National Committee hasn't been able to tap the intellectual talent to create a policy arm for the party...

...Something like that cynicism has already become visible in New York State, where aid to education has grown 88 percent since 1982 but without any discernible result...

...There is also a piece on the First Amendment and group defamation, the first of a series of articles on the free-speech issue on and off campus...

...In the years since, the individualism justifiably at the heart of the liberal ethos has swelled to produce a legalitarian liberalism so preoccupied with individual claims as to be scarcely aware of the consequences of those claims for the larger community...

...Working Papers was divided against itself, caught between New Left nostrums that required the dismantling of "corporate liberalism" and a desire to make welfare-state programs work more effectively...

...Galbraith appeals to a world of vanished certainSUMMER • 1990 • 395 Notebook ties in which we could be sure that the Republicans were always the stupid party...

...Lack of trust in government produces contradictory trends, so that even as voters say they want more government to meet pressing problems, they have, according to most surveys, become more sympathetic to the Republicans...

...Starr has written confidently of liberalism as entirely self-sufficient and apart from socialism...

...Every side in a policy dispute is now capable of calling on its own hired academics to sustain its fixed positions...

...Instead, the initial editorial is largely dedicated to the tactical possibilities opened up by the fall of communism...

...Its then largely liberal editors could mock the "ingrained philistinism and anti-intellectualism" of American politics because they were sure that social science promised real advances...

...But much of the material is good—wellthoughtout and well-documented...

...It is the loss of such certainties that should have pushed the editors to lay out at least part of a new public philosophy for liberalism...

...Kennedy, whose insistence on defending both racial equality and a common culture has drawn harsh and often personal criticism, says, "Everything is up for discussion...

...Kennedy is sufficiently self-confident to give "the last word" to one of his white associate editors, Peter Cicchino, who complains about the neoconservative tone of Stephen Carter's article on affirmative action...

...A new quarterly journal, the American Prospect, edited by Paul Starr, the prizewinning Princeton sociologist, and Robert Kuttner, the widely respected economic journalist, tries to narrow the gap...

...They show that many of those on welfare are already working off the books in order to supplement their meager allowances...

...One would have to go back to the uninspired Democratic presidential candidacies of James Cox in 1920 and John W. Davis in 1924 to find a period in which intellectuals were as cut off from Democratic party politics as they've been in the eighties...

...Two articles in particular demonstrate fresh thinking...

...But there is little in the historical record to support his confidence...

...It was left-wing pressure that leavened the liberal elitism of Roosevelt's Braintrusters...

...But even with the "peace dividend" the editors are counting on, the public mood will revert to cynicism unless voters can be shown that "more government" works...

...396 • DISSENT...

...Starr's editorial introduction, which calls for "the creative use of government for common purposes," refers back to what was best in the New Deal tradition...

...In the new environment not much distinguishes one set of experts from another...