Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
It's a sour moment. The right has attained new power, but its intellectual, not to mention moral, bankruptcy has never been more evident. The GOP's "Contract with America" regurgitates...
...Yet Clinton hasn't defined America's post—cold war role any more than he has reset the nation's domestic agenda...
...If the Republicans have new power, it can't be said that they come with new ideas...
...Michael Walzer's "The Politics of Rescue" makes a compelling case for setting aside the usual qualms about interceding abroad when the stakes are greatly imperiled populations...
...They succeeded and still succeed...
...It is true that the Clinton administration can boast a decline in the deficit, low inflation, and lower unemployment...
...A legacy of the 1960s does burden today's politics, though it's not what agitates Newt Gingrich...
...Much can still happen in the next two years...
...Congress's agenda, throughout much of the period, was set by centrist and conservative Democrats in collusion with Republicans...
...Atop its immediate agenda must be understanding America's rightward shift, but not solely in light of the failure of Clinton's centrism...
...WINTER • 1995 • 5...
...Republicans were in the Oval Office for twenty of the last twenty-six years, and the other six found centrist if not conservative Democrats there...
...He should pay heed to Marc Bloch, the late French historian, who once remarked: if someone to your left says two plus two is four and someone to your right says two plus two is five, the appropriate conclusion is not that two plus two is four and a half...
...The left has also failed to provide a vision that resonates in the country...
...indeed, they've nationalized the Southern strategy...
...This Dissent includes two notable articles in this regard...
...In the meantime, Newt Gingrich maligns Great Society programs and "the counterculture" as sins that begot an American fall...
...Which allows him to sidestep what the 1980s wrought—a welfare state for the rich...
...We will initiate some tough-minded reconsiderations in the Spring issue of Dissent...
...Clinton was quick to abandon the economic stimulus package and is ill-inclined to policies that might mobilize social forces with a progressive agenda...
...Gingrich has a mission—to "save American civilization" from "McGovernites," "counterculturalists," and other "enemies of normal Americans...
...we could have faced and fought two scourges, poverty and racism...
...The Republicans—here Reagan was the master— have been especially effective in pulling the center to the right...
...When this nation needed to be saying no and again no to hunger and prejudice, Republicans pursued a "Southern strategy," capitalizing on racial tension to undermine the New Deal Coalition, exploiting the country's meanest currents for political gain...
...George Packer argues that Clinton did the right thing in Haiti...
...Clinton has tried to occupy the center rather than draw it left, even though he stands at a "center" defined by the Reagan era...
...Many conservative intellectuals have been busy playing straight men for creationists, as Michael Lind points out in his article in this issue scrutinizing the decrepit intellectual state of the right...
...The GOP's "Contract with America" regurgitates Reaganesque ideas that brought this country to many of its present difficulties...
...But who has been running this country for the last quarter of a century...
...These aren't trivial, but none have stemmed the sense of long-term economic decline...
...Sometime in that tumultuous decade, around 196465, America had an extraordinary opportunity for historical greatness...
...In foreign policy, intervention in Haiti, which received bipartisan opposition, seems to have had positive results...
...Not that left-wing thought has been doing well lately...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
