A Symposium
Berman, Paul
The question poses a choice between "radical hope," which sounds grand, and "piecemeal" pleading for a "little more" democracy, which sounds piddling. Who would oppose "radical hope," given such...
...The poetry of social reform is, however, unabandonable, for better and for worse...
...Dissent has always affirmed the compatibility of socialist aspirations with the democratic liberalism of the West, and this affirmation contained the double argument that (1) liberals to our right shouldn't be timid about social reform and ought instead to consider, with the encouragement of people like ourselves, pushing further toward an egalitarian New Deal beyond all New Deals, namely, toward a socialist society...
...It is we "poets" who find ourselves in a sticky predicament, so much that we have been advised to abandon "poetry" altogether...
...Dissent authors who write about social policy with the appropriate technocratic language face only a small challenge as a result of recent events...
...A twenty-first century program in an old pamphlet of Whitman's...
...In Whitman and some of the other pre-Age of Industry radical democrats you can see a language that is capable of making ferocious social and cultural criticisms—without getting tangled up in the issues of nationalization, anti-imperialism and suchlike that are tripping us up today...
...Please, no...
...You can see the great drama of the left—the story of ordinary people fighting their way to a life of freedom—expressed in a version that, because of the richness of its concept of democracy, doesn't require us to postulate a leap that isn't going to happen into a new society of a kind that no one is thinking about today...
...I sing, therefore I am...
...Dissent has many useful functions to perform today (above all, to be a forum for debates such as the present one...
...WINTER • 1994 • 9...
...Yes, in bits and pieces...
...but we ought to recognize that, in regard to keeping up our old two-front argument against the timid liberals and the anti-democratic revolutionaries, the magazine faces a bit of a crisis...
...This crisis—it is our own version of the quandary of the democratic left everywhere— has a dimension that is rhetorical as well as programmatic...
...Whitman wrote that democracy has two sexes ("solidarity" and "personalism...
...So allow me to put the question in this slightly different and less convenient way: if we keep trying to project a radical hope by sticking more or less to our main arguments from the past, will our efforts still be credible...
...and I think that, in the field of rhetoric, we may find some solutions to our problem...
...To argue today against privatization and some other marketoriented measures would be, here and there around the world, plainly reactionary...
...From a realistic point of view, radical hope can, in any case, always be "projected," if that is our desire (which it is)—either because social conditions are so bad that practically any improvement would be radical or because 8 • DISSENT The Left After Forty Years conditions aren't bad at all, thus establishing a precedent for radical betterment in the future...
...to evoke a radical hope is to speak a poetic language...
...Today, though, several notions that spring instinctively from our old-time socialist hearts— the preference for nationalization or other kinds of collectivism, a relative de-emphasis on entrepreneurship in favor of social benefits, and so forth—can be seen to be sensible in some instances, counter-sensible in others...
...Those were good arguments, and Dissent has put them to good use, and the magazine's history is noble...
...The programmatic choice that lurks behind the symposium question—radical socialism ("hope") versus social democratic modesty ("piecemeal")— has become, in short, obsolete, considered as a worldv.iew...
...Who would oppose "radical hope," given such an alternative...
...My suggestion is to urge everyone—not just our more literary types—to look into the writings of the author I have just cited, especially his Democratic Vistas...
...To propose specific piecemeal reforms is to speak a technocratic language...
...and in a similar vein, the rhetoric of social reform also has two sexes (technocratic language and a language that can be called poetic...
...A few inspirations, maybe some new thoughts about democracy and history...
...But where can a new poetry come from, now that the main tropes of radical socialism remain useful to us only in some respects and not in others...
...and (2) revolutionaries to our left need not drown themselves in antidemocratic nihilism but ought to harness their ideals to the practical social advances that democracy allows...
...A glance at the older language of radical democracy might even help the gloomy pessimists among us notice that, around the world, a democratic revolution is still advancing amid the wars and catastrophes, and "radical hope" has become more, not less, tangible than before in vast portions of the world—even if "hope" in the post-1989 era of never-ending astonishments has in several regards failed to follow the lines that our own political tradition would have projected in the past...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
