A Symposium
Wilentz, Sean
The question is malposed. Unless and until things change dramatically for the better, here and abroad, there will be bright dreams and hopes for a different order. Dissent's...
...Whereas at some points on the political map there is too much activism and too little intellect (or intellect merely placed in the service of activism, in endless syndicated re-runs of the 1960s), there is room for something else...
...Far from irrelevant, it contained a language of democracy and justice that is more universal today than Thomas Jefferson envisioned...
...Coming at the height of George Bush's 16 • DISSENT The Left After Forty Years popularity, it was mainly a symbolic act of showing the flag, with as far as I could see no practical effect...
...Dissent's particular contributions to those dreams come in many ways, not least out of its alertness to the appalling economic injustices that most American intellectuals now seem to take as inevitable...
...Leading a political double life, between bright dreams and piecemeal reforms, is risky...
...To the extreme left, it has insisted that liberal democracy, whatever its existing flaws, has fundamental virtues...
...There is our melody...
...Look at the United States...
...Keeping that up might, in itself, be a great blow for political principle...
...It was an anomalous position during the cold war decades, but a carefully examined one—and, to those who held to it, a familiar one...
...PEN has admirably defended threatened authors in different countries...
...WINTER • 1994 • 17...
...But in the end, I think our radicalism really does lie in that long revolution, as the statement tried to express...
...How is Dissent to face this new political world and address it in ways that might matter...
...But in an America where socialism is discredited and where liberalism is in an intellectual crisis, how do we say what we mean to say without becoming irrelevant...
...Today, that world and its political alignments have everywhere collapsed...
...A few years ago, the magazine ran a statement of principles, "Democratic Vistas...
...But then there comes to mind a line that Marx was found of quoting: there is the rock—now jump...
...And although a few revolutionary sects, of the Old and New Left variety, still cling to a kitschy afterlife, most of the extreme left has trailed off from socialism into the politics of personal identity or into academic fads...
...There was something shocking when, a few years back, the disastrous fire at Hamlet, North Carolina—the Triangle Fire of the 1980s—did not bring a more outraged response from political writers and thinkers...
...The intelligentsia has acquitted itself better regarding Salman Rushdie...
...Putting matters that way may be difficult for those of us rightly skeptical of popular-front platitudes, raised on a tougher brand of socialism...
...Although many intelligent people of liberal instincts remain on the scene— and in some cases hold positions of great power—the American liberalism that emerged out of the New Deal and the Second World War is conspicuously absent...
...I think that Dissent can benefit from a little intellectual activism...
...And there is no end of technical discussions on these policy-related matters, where the magazine's expertise and its sensibility have much to offer...
...It easily gets labeled half-hearted and hypocritical—and may actually become half-hearted and hypocritical...
...Dissent and its friends confront, I think, a different problem...
...there are our beliefs...
...More recently, it has taken Susan Sontag to rivet intellectuals' attention on Bosnia...
...The two armies we used to maneuver around and through (and occasionally raid) have folded their tents and left the field...
...If Dissent has distinguished itself in this regard, it has been in avoiding pompous, pseudo-scientific jargon while at the same time remaining utterly serious...
...Nothing utopian: only the creation of the kind of democratic forum that seems to be fading away in the media-driven culture of money...
...But I am thinking of something different, a matter of tone or idiom...
...Yet in the matter of tone and idiom, it was a useful exercise, a sort of clearing of the throat, in which the statement's authors located the magazine's ideals in the long revolution that began in this country in 1776...
...Now that communism is dead, it seems like the ultimate folly to revive the old project of political utopianism, our utopianism, while casting aspersions (as the question quietly does) on less transcendent pursuits...
...For nearly forty years, the magazine has occupied an honorable if precarious place between liberalism and extreme (or revolutionary) leftism...
...Yet politics in this country is a piecemeal and pragmatic business, rooted in democratic values we respect and wish to enlarge upon...
...But in view of where the left has been and is now, the risk is acceptable...
...To the liberals, Dissent has insisted that capitalism's cruelties are not aberrations but built-in features of a system badly in need of repair...
...Surely Dissent can do its bit, within its resources, to sponsor public discussions on events of great urgency, to revive a sphere for humane protest beyond what appears in our pages...
...For all of our worrying, and for all of the surprises that came our way, there was a certain predictability to the world shaped by the superpowers...
...We could, of course, point to a long list of problems, from the Bosnian horror to the state of the trade unions, and say that we have something to say...
...It feels lonelier than ever...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
