Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
This is a time for argument. The world after communism, after the fall of the last of the great empires, doesn't conform to anyone's expectations. There are still pretenders, left and right,...
...On this page, we will take responsibility and explain our successes and failures...
...We take up some of the critical problems of our own society in this issue, with articles on economic policy, immigration, violence, and constitutional reform (health care will be featured in the Winter issue...
...intense...
...The quality of life of ordinary Americans, especially of poor, unemployed, uninsured, and unprotected Americans, hangs on the outcome...
...It is never exactly what we had in mind...
...But it also reflects, more haphazardly, the uneven yield of articles delivered from articles promised...
...politics looks pale indeed...
...But we don't doubt the meaningfulness of the decisions soon to be made by the president and Congress...
...The set of articles that we publish together in any single issue reflects, obviously, our sense of what is most important and most interesting for us (editors and writers) and for the readers we hope to reach...
...But no one that I know knows what ought to be done about the major post-imperial questions: transitional politics and economics (from what to what...
...On all these issues, there is a wide range of opinion among our editors and writers, which we intend to represent in the magazine...
...and low expectations seem the right response...
...Even modest successes for the new administration will open the way for a more experimental politics, social ferment, democratic initiatives...
...Most of our readers will be relieved to discover that none of our writers mentions the "politics of meaning...
...There will be changes, of course, as we go along, but Dissent will continue to be his magazine: committed to an enduring set of values...
...and, whenever necessary, dissident...
...That is why, though we shall certainly be critical of many of President Clinton's policy proposals, we will not encourage an ultra-leftist rejection of the possibilities his victory opens up...
...Liberalism and the left rise (and fall) together...
...Nothing better is likely to be available in American politics in the near future...
...But we intend a larger memorial: the magazine itself and our continuing engagement with the problems of socialism and democracy...
...undogmatic...
...Still, the buck stops here...
...In the academy, liberal political theory is undergoing a welcome revival...
...argumentative...
...M.W...
...We carry in this issue a collection of memories and memorials for Irving Howe by his children and a large number of friends and comrades, from here and abroad...
...Or like Tom Nairn's piece on Bosnia: an account of nationalism more accepting (in my own view, more realistic) than many of our readers are likely to find acceptable...
...And yet a large question will be decided in the coming months: whether there is an American liberalism of sufficient strength and coherence to shape our future...
...new/old nationalism, religious revival, civil war, internationalist intervention, mass immigration, multiculturalism...
...So we will publish controversial pieces, like the Gunter Grass articles on East Germany in previous issues and his report from Cuba in this one, arguing in both cases for a slowed (and locally organized) transition out of communism, critical of Western triumphalism...
...There are still pretenders, left and right, to ideological correctness...
...But in the country at large and in Washington, liberals look and sound like a fearful minority—and Clinton like a minority president, unsupported, as Harold Meyerson says in this issue, by any kind of political mobilization...
...Why that is so, why Clinton is so weak and liberalism virtually invisible, is a subject that we need to explore in coming issues...
...q FALL • 1993 • 401...
...We promise to keep the arguments lively and civil...
...Here we will introduce the issue, worry about what it includes and doesn't include, and make promises for the future...
...Let them respond in the next issue...
...High hopes (why not...
...One small change is this page, which Mitchell Cohen and I will take turns writing...
...Compared to Bosnia, U.S...
...We should be glad that the stakes are lower here...
...we won't allow even metaphorical expulsions or excommunications...
...We want Dissent to be the place where a new kind of leftist politics is hammered out, even if the hammering sometimes hurts...
...Or like Shlomo Avineri's account of Islamic "fundamentalism," which rejects Voltairian scorn for the sake of historical and sociological understanding...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
