DEMOCRATIC VISTAS 1991: A STATEMENT FOR THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT
We speak as Americans of the democratic left. We wish to advance our views regarding the current American situation—without, of course, any pretense to completeness or agreement on every point....
...Only social action through government intervention and through the efforts of trade unions and other large groups of mobilized citizens can do these things...
...Only an unambiguously justified resort to force could fail to make it more difficult to achieve a peaceful international culture...
...Abortion rights—which benefit men as well as women—have been weakened and are being threatened...
...But beneath the surface, there is profound uneasiness, a sense of things gone wrong, an atmosphere of alarm and anxiety...
...An alliance needs to be formed...
...The first responsibility of intellectuals is criticism...
...As a feminist and a radical, I see freedom of sexual orientation and legitimacy for relationships and households outside the conventional family as bottom-line issues...
...On all these fronts, the fight is far from over...
...The nuclear state-within-a-state goes on despoiling the land, seemingly indifferent to the cold war's end...
...Meanwhile, social misery has become normal...
...An especially pernicious heritage of Reaganism has been the systematic weakening of the labor unions, the resort to crude unionbusting by corporations, the open anti-union bias of governmental agencies...
...forests are destroyed and deserts spread, in part because of local corruption and greed, in part because of Western pressure for profits and resources...
...This statement is being issued by the individuals listed below and there is no organizational sponsorship...
...While attitudes in some parts of American society become more reactionary and bigoted with regard to race and ethnic differences, the actual racial and ethnic composition of the population is becoming ever more varied...
...and the invasion of Panama was condemned by every other member of the Security 480 • DISSENT Democratic Vistas Council and by virtually every other government in the world...
...Our hope is to stimulate the forces that work for democratic social change...
...The American Revolution itself, then the Jacksonian reforms of the 1820s, the abolitionist movement, and the war to free the slaves, the farm populists of the 1890s, the Socialists and Wobblies of the 1910s, the seventyyearlong movement for women's suffrage, the New Dealers and unionists of the thirties, the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, the antiwar mobilizers of the sixties and early seventies, the social criticism of writers like Michael Harrington, the feminist movement of the sixties into the present, the movements to extend individual freedom in new directions, the ecology movement of the present moment— these represent the great tradition of American reform...
...Because so much money is required for television campaigns, big capital controls political life to a degree never before known in American history...
...We want a world in which the life-chances of children are no longer so dramatically predictable on the basis of economic condition, race, and gender as they are today...
...One in five Americans has no health insurance...
...At the top of society as at the bottom, less regulation means more crime...
...It ought—especially the humane social democrats within it—examine why so many mechanically support this holocaust...
...Nearly twenty million Americans suffer from hunger...
...The United States and much of the rest of the industrial world are burning up the future through careless energy policies...
...This country needs a democratic left—a movement that will speak about the democrati476 • DISSENT Democratic Vistas zation of society, that will seek to control business and to stimulate investment and innovation for the general good, that will create a basis for majority electoral coalitions...
...that having invited popular uprisings in Iraq, President Bush was unconscionably late in shielding the Kurds...
...Not only did the U.S...
...they still have too little access to high level positions, to decision making, to political power...
...Even the Reaganites had policies to offer—bad ones, but at least policies...
...But neither are we willing to stare at every calamity and limply conclude that no solutions can be found...
...they were revolutions in behalf of freedom...
...When welfare measures are cut, crime and poverty increase...
...Reaganism, a partial counterrevolution, could not quite destroy this social contract, but it severely weakened it, both in terms of legislation and popular thought...
...What has also collapsed is the rationale for the cold war and its policy of a balance of terror...
...At home, the infrastructure rots...
...Democratic Socialists of America DAVID BRODY University of California, Davis DAVID BRODY Mineola, New York DAVID BROMWICH ABE BRUMBERG CRAIG CALHOUN University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill LUTHER P. CARPENTER College of Staten Island (CUNY) BLAIR CLARK RICHARD CLOWARD Columbia University JOSHUA F. COHEN Institute for Clinical Social Work, Chicago MITCHELL COHEN Dissent JOHN C. CORT DSA Religion and Socialism Commission LEWIS COSER Boston College ROSE LAUB COSER Boston College ROBERT A. DAHL Yale University (Emeritus) GLORIA EMERSON CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN Graduate Center, CUNY ERNEST ERBER Columbia Maryland Democratic Club JAMES FARMER Founder, Former Director, Congress of Racial Equality JEFF FAUX Economic Policy Institute RASHI FEIN Harvard Medical School LEON FINK University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill RICHARD FLACKS University of California, Santa Barbara 478 • DISSENT Democratic Vistas RAYMOND S. FRANKLIN Director, Michael Harrington Center, Queens College, CUNY GEORGE FREDRICKSON Stanford University JAMES GALBRAITH University of Texas at Austin HERBERT J. GANS Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University DAVID J. GARROW EMANUEL GELTMAN Dissent GARY GERSTLE Catholic University of America HERBERT GINTIS Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts TODD GITLIN University of California, Berkeley ALLEN GRAUBARD Oakland Public Schools PHILIP GREEN Smith College STEPHANIE HARRINGTON Writer HEIDI HARTMANN Institute for Women's Policy Research ROBERT HASS University of California, Berkeley MURRAY HAUSKNECHT ROBERT HEILBRONER New School for Social Research RONALD HELLMAN Director, Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, CUNY NAT HENTOFF ARTHUR HERTZBERG Dartmouth College...
...It's just because this is so large and vague but important a topic that I regret that the statement offers no help in thinking about it...
...GEORGE SCIALABBA: I agree strongly with the statement as a whole, so I'm glad to be a signatory...
...Much of today's social misery is avoidable— it is due, in good part, to economic and political arrangements rigged against, or at best indifferent to, the common good...
...The right rode high, the left fell back, and even the widespread sense of social crisis did not bring up a vivid debate about national direction...
...A better society is entirely imaginable in this country—a society that enjoys the freedoms that have always been celebrated by the liberal tradition and that moves toward the egalitarianism, the social justice, and liberation from alienated work that have always been the goals of socialism...
...The result is an abysmal level of political discourse, a systematic avoidance of problems in behalf of fatuous and scurrilous symbolism—as in George Bush's stress in 1988 on the Pledge of Allegiance and the crimes of Willie Horton...
...Race forms an economic tier: whites on top, blacks on the bottom...
...Others thought sanctions the proper means to accomplish these ends and thought the carnage of war the greater evil...
...But having lived for so long under the dictatorship of the party-state, some East Europeans imagine that unregulated capitalism will have none of the bad effects in their countries that it has had in other countries...
...Military research continues to absorb the lion's share of scientific talent and technological investment...
...There is a democratic dream to be renewed...
...The more severe America's problems become, the less we seem able to discuss them...
...In conservative folklore, poverty is caused by welfare and can be cured by work...
...The great historical event of the past few years has been the collapse of the communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the crisis of communism in the Soviet Union...
...Women still earn less than men for similar performance...
...Where there are conflicts between goals, as inevitably there will be, bargains have to be struck...
...Something is wrong with a culture that dismisses such concerns as foolish or naive...
...There is no single cause of, no single solution to, the dangers and problems we face today...
...It cannot generate a feeling of community...
...Yet somehow we have become accustomed to seeing this condition as "natural...
...democratic socialism resists capital...
...10017...
...With time, however, the appeal of unbridled capitalism is likely to fade, and society's weakest segments will organize to ensure that they are not forced to pay the price for the introduction of "free" markets...
...protest is scattered and incoherent...
...What has come to an end is the last shred of legitimacy for the communist world, which for three quarters of a century usurped and befouled the ideal of socialism...
...Even so, some thirty-two million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, according to official statistics, are poor...
...Here is where the two main traditions of opposition ought to work out articles of confederation...
...However intensely East Europeans advocate utopian capitalism, the new democracies could discover that their place in the global economy resembles Argentina or Mexico more than Sweden or Germany...
...Yet Congress has only nibbled away at the Pentagon budget, and the Pentagon, in turn, is already exploiting the Gulf War to argue for absurdly inflated Reaganite military budgets...
...The collapse of communism ought no more to drive intellectuals to the right than the miseries of unbridled capitalism ever justified the embrace of communism in the first place...
...Victims of violence are to be found disproportionately among racial minorities, the elderly, homosexuals, children, and women beaten by husbands and partners—wherever people are vulnerable...
...And so the immediate successor to communism is not, as we had hoped, social democracy...
...Many millions more, not officially counted as poor, are only one illness or marital breakdown away from penury...
...Yet for too many people race is still destiny...
...WILLIAM ADAMS Wesleyan University GAR ALPEROVITZ National Center for Economic Alternatives STANLEY ARONOWITZ Editor, Social Text ED ASNER BERNARD AVISHAI Ade1phi University BEN BAGDIKIAN BENJAMIN BARBER Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy/Rutgers University JOANNE BARKAN DAVID BELKIN MARSHALL BERMAN PAUL BERMAN PAUL BERNICK JULES BERNSTEIN CASEY BLAKE Indiana University ZENA S. BLAU University of Houston BARRY BLUESTONE University of Massachusetts at Boston HORST BRAND Dissent...
...government to aggression, indeed its decision whether to undertake aggression, has been entirely unprincipled, i.e., determined by economic, military, ideological, or electoral, rather than legal or humanitarian, considerations...
...The social contract—never adequate, but a major step forward—created by American liberalism, through the New Deal and its successors, said that the federal government has a responsibility to guarantee the accountability of the institutions on which the country depends...
...We do not believe that human society is ever likely to know perfection...
...Faced with continuing trade deficits, the Pentagon—along with other powers—goes on fueling the international arms trade...
...Since the late 1960s, neoconservatives have not been bashful about promoting their policies—and perhaps even more important, striking an emotional tone, a sour vision...
...The age of totalitarianism is evidently over, and many parts of the world enjoy a democratic resurgence...
...JUDITH STEIN City College of New York RONNIE J. STEINBERG Temple University LAURENT STERN Philosophy Department, Rutgers University Ross THOMAS Writer CHARLES TILLY New School for Social Research LOUISE A. TILLY RICHARD M. VALELLY Massachusetts Institute of Technology EDWIN VARGAS National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights MICHAEL WALZER Dissent CYNTHIA WARD Commonwealth Institute JERRY G. WATTS Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut THOMAS WEISSKOPF Professor of Economics, University of Michigan CORNEL WEST Princeton University SEAN WILENTZ Princeton University ELLEN WILLIS WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON University of Chicago LANGDON WINNER Professor of Political Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ALAN WOLFE New School for Social Research JOSEPHINE WOLL DENNIS H. WRONG New York University C.M...
...that the United Nations should be strengthened so as to promote regional security...
...The revolutions of 1989 were not, in essence, revolutions in behalf of capitalism...
...That is not what a democratic society should look like...
...a society that can arouse itself for moral and democratic aims and not cave in to the media campaigns and manipulations of powerful elites...
...Yet it is by no means clear that even during the depths of the Reagan trance the right could count on a majority of the public...
...One of the few triumphs in the last two decades has been the rise of the feminist movement...
...ZELMANOWICZ Jewish Labor Bund STEVEN ZIPPERSTEIN University of California at Los Angeles A few signers have written to say that they disagree with one or another point in the preceding statement...
...Liberalism in the European sense—the belief in liberty—resists the state...
...Black family income in 1987 was only 56 percent of whites...
...But the gains have been only partial, and some have been lost again...
...If we consider "net financial assets" —a household's net worth minus equity in homes and vehicles— the gap is even wider: the median of the top one percent of households in the United States is 237 times greater than the median of the other 99 percent...
...Whatever alliance is formed will have to be reformed, and reformed again—this is in the nature of a complicated society...
...The "sound bite," the media consultant, the multimillion-dollar television campaign—these dominate political life...
...America needs more of a liberal sensibility on these matters, not less...
...Two-thirds of black households have zero or negative net financial assets—compared with 30 percent of white households...
...Stereotypical images of gender continue to be projected on TV and in the culture at large...
...Forty percent of the poor are children under eighteen, which means that one-fifth of all American children are poor...
...Has there ever before been an administration in Washington so openly indifferent to the condition of the country...
...intervention in the Gulf has become all too apparent since the end of the war...
...we have, however inadequately, managed to introduce some Social Security, universal education, Medicare, and other benefits...
...A generation has passed since the civil rights revolution, which remains a great victory of radical democratic action in America...
...Weekly BERNARD RAPOPORT LEO RIBUFFO George Washington University CHRISTINE RIDDIOUGH Union of Concerned Scientists FRANK ROOSEVELT Sarah Lawrence College RICHARD RORTY University of Virginia RUTH ROSEN University of California at Davis JAN ROSENBERG MARVIN ROZEN Pennsylvania State University LILLIAN B. RUBIN Professor, Queens College, CUNY JAMES RULE State University of New York, Stony Brook NICK SALVATORE Cornell University JEFFREY SCHEUER KRISTA SCHNEIDER Public Employee Department, AFL-CIO JOSEPH SCHWARTZ Professor, Department of Political Science, Temple University GEORGE SCIALABBA RICHARD SENNETT New York University FRED SIEGEL JAMES SLEEPER ALAN SNITOW SUSAN SONTAG JUDITH STACEY University of California at Davis CHRISTINE STANSELL Princeton University IRWIN STARK Professor Emeritus, C.C.N.Y...
...We believe, however, that the question of the management and ownership of the economy is fundamental...
...Rather, for the democratic left, the collapse of communism and the demise of the cold war should be occasions for renewal—for fresh thinking, vigorous debate, criticism, and vision...
...Weekly S. M. MILLER Commonwealth Institute NICOLAUS MILLS Sarah Lawrence College DAVID MOBERG In These Times GUY MOLYNEUX Commonwealth Institute JEFFERSON MORLEY Spin magazine JO-ANN MORT Dissent CAROL O'CLEIREACAIN New York City Commissioner of Finance GEORGE PACKER Writer NANCY PACKER Stanford University JAY PARINI Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont ORLANDO PATTERSON MAXINE PHILLIIPS Dissent MARJORIE PHYFE Democratic Socialists of America FRANCES Fox PIVEN Distinguished Professor, Graduate School, CUNY SIMONE PLASTRIK Dissent FALL • 1991 • 479 Democratic Vistas DAVID PLOTKE Yale University KATHA POLLITT KIT RACHLIS L.A...
...tilt toward Iraq before August 2, 1990 only fed Saddam Hussein's dangerous ambitions and paved the road to war...
...The end of the cold war created an opportunity to apply some of the country's wealth to social reconstruction (and to ease the burdens of transformation in Eastern Europe and the Third World...
...Nature degrades faster than regulations arrest the degradation...
...American society has acquired a shape that, from a democratic perspective, is unjust...
...By itself the market cannot generate social equality or justice...
...Men in Harlem live shorter lives than men in Bangladesh...
...It is the practical dream of libertarians like Thomas Paine and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of socialists and trade unionists like Eugene V. Debs and A. Philip Randolph, of civil rights champions like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., the dream of rebellious slaves, indignant trade unionists, humanrights workers, defenders of individual freedom and of the earth and the air...
...Whatever the subsequent difficulties, the revolutions of 1989 will remain magnificent achievements...
...a society in which the poor will rise at least to the minimal levels of a decent life...
...For a renewed democratic left, intellectual work matters...
...STANLEY ARONOWITZ: The cynicism of the U.S...
...Meanwhile, the Bush administration proposes to do nothing about poverty except cut still further welfare programs like WIC and AFDC...
...indignation is diverted and blocked...
...What cannot be compromised, though, is our shared commitment to democratic values...
...The manipulation of domestic public opinion during the war also surely deserved mention...
...The principle on which all signers are said to agree, that "aggression must be resisted," has been regularly disregarded by the United States in the case of aggression by its allies against victims less resource-rich than Kuwait: in Cyprus, in East Timor, in Bangladesh, in the Spanish Sahara, in Lebanon...
...FALL • 1991 • 473 Democratic Vistas Crash privatization, as in Poland, can bring in its wake social misery...
...A great question must now be posed, and if there were a sufficiently vigorous opposition in Congress and public life, it would be hammering away at this question: If the United States could succeed in transporting half a million soldiers and a vast quantity of war materiel within a few months to engage in the Gulf War, why does our government seem so feeble, so lax (and relaxed) before the task of mobilizing American resources to cope with our growing poverty, the shame of homelessness, the collapse of the cities, the breakdown of the infrastructure, the failures of education, the scandals of racism and sexism...
...Every twenty or thirty years FALL • 1991 • 477 Democratic Vistas throughout the history of the United States, there has been a wave of such movements, representing the strength of American life...
...Neglect is the policy of Bush, indifference the motivating outlook...
...In this country the great majority enjoy a significant degree of democratic freedom...
...attack a dictatorship that it had supported for more than a decade, but the war resulted in the deaths of perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis...
...American political culture seems most invigorated only at moments when it can confront an external enemy...
...Everyone can point to signs of social decline, even social breakdown—poverty, crime, drugs, the breakdown of cities, the savings and loan crisis, the failure to provide decent health insurance for millions of people...
...Institutional listings for the following signers are for identification only...
...This is the background for political life in America...
...The collapse of communism and the military victory in the Gulf have been greeted with smugness...
...I'm disappointed, though, that it doesn't mention what seem to me the most objectionable aspects of American policy in the Gulf...
...Yet a great many of the poor are women with young children...
...A desire for such a movement isn't hard to detect, either—among educated young people, for instance, who wish to pursue careers devoted to social progress, egalitarianism, the sharing of privileges...
...and that arms sales should be brought under international control...
...The median net worth of the top 1 percent of households is twenty-two times greater than the median net worth of the other 99 percent...
...FALL • 1991 • 481...
...World Jewish Congress HENDRIK HERTZBERG Editor, the New Republic ADAM HOCHSCHILD ARLIE HOCHSCHILD DICK HOWARD Philosophy Department, SUNY at Stony Brook IRVING HOWE Dissent H. STUART HUGHES Professor Emeritus of History, University of California, San Diego DOUG IRELAND Columnist, Village Voice JEFF ISAAC Indiana University MAURICE ISSERMAN Hamilton College JOHN JUDIS PHILIP KASINITZ Williams College ALFRED KAZIN MICHAEL KAZIN Book Editor, Tikkun MURRAY KEMPTON ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS Rutgers University MARTIN KILSON Department of Government, Harvard University CHARLES KNIGHT Commonwealth Institute LUCY KOMISAR Journalist and author ROBERT KUTTNER Co-Editor, the American Prospect PATRICK LACEFIELD Commission on United States-Latin American Relations JEREMY LARNER PAUL LAUB Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania DINAH S. LEVENTHAL SUSAN LEVINE University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill MARK LEVINSON SANFORD LEVINSON University of Texas Law School ROBERT JAY LIFTON City University of New York MICHAEL LIGHTY National Director, Democratic Socialists of America CHARLES E. LINDBLOM Professor Emeritus, Yale University ARIEN MACK Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research PETER MANDLER Princeton University LEO MARX Massachusetts Institute of Technology JOHN G. MASON Michael Harrington Center, Queens College, CUNY GEORGE MCALMON Lawyer, El Paso, Texas NEIL MCLAUGHLIN Sociology Department, CUNY Graduate Center JOHN MEAD RABBI MARSHALL MEYER Congregation B'Nai Jeshurun HAROLD MEYERSON Executive Editor, L.A...
...ELLEN WILLIS: While I don't expect to agree with every particular of a would-be consensus statement, I must strongly protest its failure to affirm lesbian and gay rights against the massive homophobic backlash of recent years...
...But the Bush administration, from moral cynicism or social ignorance or both, behaves as if all the social ills that are visible in the streets simply do not exist or can be cured through the mysterious ministrations of the market...
...Economic inequality persists, and so do political and social inequality...
...But our history of political and social movements offers a different vista...
...Cynicism about politics is the most prevalent mood—a mood that enables retreat and accommodation...
...Millions of others cannot find work...
...What is discredited is arbitrary power— "private" or "public...
...Meanwhile, in the impoverished majority of the world, American companies dump chemicals banned for American use...
...we have, in spite of everything, made some progress in creating opportunities for groups previously discriminated against...
...A society that kills 1.6 million developing human beings a year hardly requires a strengthening of abortion rights...
...To see the social ills of America as "natural" or beyond remedy by human beings is to acquiesce in the ideology of reaction...
...In the name of democracy and equality, we must criticize power, criticize vigorously and relentlessly—criticize even the movements we value, for we know how movements can turn against their own proclaimed ends...
...It is possible to imagine a society in which working women and men through unions and other institutions will be able to shape the economy and their working lives, and will not have to surrender to corporate power...
...In an America where many felt threatened by crime, neoconservatives offered rationalizations for social recoil...
...The social basis for such a left already exists—in the unions and in women's movements, in movements for ecology, for the rights of minorities and immigrants...
...Here, in briefest summary, are a few of the issues—neglected, denied—that our country must confront: • The government defines poverty at an extremely low level...
...The median net worth of whites is 11.7 times that of blacks...
...Habits of forbearance, trust, cooperation, abstention from military force—these will take generations to become firmly established...
...The current fad for a "free" or unregulated market—a figment of pure ideology —cannot lead to equitable socioeconomic solutions...
...About the Gulf War the signers of this statement have different opinions...
...Some of the worst notions of the last decade—supply-side economics, the supposed failure of Great Society programs, the claimed superiority of right-wing over leftwing dictatorships, the presumed American lag in nuclear arms—emanated from intellectuals and well-placed publicists...
...Hardly anything has been done about poverty, violence, and crime for years...
...In the name of the common good that always requires uncommon work, let us do what we can to renew that dream...
...Beneath the many varieties of social misery is a pattern: the systematic maldistribution of resources and of government expenditures...
...If so, then let us, through renewed common action, call upon greater social, moral, and financial resources...
...Whatever our criticisms of some segments of the union leadership, we remain convinced that the labor movement has been and continues to be a major force in the struggle for progressive social measures on the domestic front...
...Markets constitute a system for distributing goods and capital, and it is all but meaningless to speak of or evaluate markets apart from the social system and economic structure within which they function...
...An already terrible situation grows worse...
...Atmospheric warming, ozone destruction, toxic dumps, lung-destroying air, poisoned water, carcinogenic food, the reckless plowing under of farmland, energy waste, dependency on fossil fuels— these are American facts...
...NAT HENTOFF: I dissent on one count of the statement: abortion rights...
...The United States was itself found guilty of aggression in Nicaragua by the highest international legal tribunal...
...To abolish markets altogether would be foolish, but to let them operate without substantial regulation must surely lead to greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands...
...q Copies of this statement are available at $1 each from Dissent, 521 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y...
...The homicide rate among young men in the United States is far higher—four to seventy-three times—than in other industrial countries...
...Still we can agree on certain points: that the U.S...
...The homeless are merely poverty's most visible representatives...
...But who will propose and initiate democratic social action for substantial reform in a day when the "free market" has become a popular ideology...
...The democratic left should condemn our involvement in this war...
...Programs are announced— "wars" on drugs—but the programs are largely rhetorical...
...Recent frauds on Wall Street and in the savings-and-loans banks represent, in terms of FALL • 1991 • 475 Democratic Vistas dollars, probably the greatest crime wave in American history...
...We face the decline of coherent political publics (not least of all, that of American liberalism) and a fragmentation of political life that reduces too many citizens to mere spectators...
...Such democratic successes are largely due to everrecurring waves of radical reform...
...We need to reassert the democratic goal of racial integration...
...Reaganism and its puny offspring in the Bush administration are a major source of the social squalor increasingly afflicting this country...
...If anything, the collapse of communism ought to free the left's thinking from any residual fantasies about the necessity, let alone the virtue, of the party-state...
...People are perplexed and troubled more than they are unambiguously conservative...
...It is sometimes said that these tasks are more difficult than conducting a war thousands of miles from our 474 • DISSENT Democratic Vistas shores...
...They have asked that brief explanatory remarks be appended describing their disagreement, even though they are in accord with the statement as a whole...
...During the Reagan years, the United States spent $2.4 trillion dollars financing an overblown military machine...
...That these issues were omitted, while at the same time some recipients of the statement objected to endorsing abortion rights, raises the question (not for the first time) of whether the differences between cultural radicals and cultural conservatives preclude a real consensus under the banner of "the left...
...Some thought war the only means available to force Iraq to leave Kuwait and reduce its military threat...
...Someone is appointed drug "czar," but the "czar" does little except to advance his public relations...
...A strong, assertive liberalism is a prerequisite for the changes that are needed in America, as well as for the renewal of a linked or adjacent democratic left...
...It seems clear that the response of the U.S...
...It is this perspective that causes us to look with dismay at the recent weakening and floundering of American liberalism within the Democratic party...
...The black middle class has prospered to some degree, but the ghetto decays...
...The vistas of potential success for a reformed and consistently democratic left in America may at the moment seem small...
...One might suppose that America's triumph means that our troubles are over—that all we need from the future is more of the past...
...But my deepest, though vaguest, disquiet about the war concerns its inflammatory effect on international public opinion...
...that aggression must be resisted, by peaceful means if possible, by military means if necessary...
...It cannot look out for the environment, for the rights of the oppressed, or even, at times, for the long-range interest of its own most enthusiastic champions...
...that the best American role in the Middle East is to support a general peace settlement and democratic government...
...By the time the Reagan administration came into office, the neoconservatives had set the terms of debate in the media and policy circles...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
