Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
The publication schedule of Dissent doesn't fit neatly with the political schedule of American democracy — so we were not able to "cover" the electoral disaster of November '94. But the role of...
...we don't know what American politics would look like if 74 percent instead of 37 percent of eligible voters actually voted...
...The ideological fervor of the contemporary right is a bit surprising...
...the strength of the economic interests that the ideology masks is not surprising at all...
...We can't say that we foresaw the full dimensions of the turn, though we have been worrying about the weakening position of the liberal left for some time...
...Both Leo Ribuffo's piece on the politics of right-wing Christian evangelism and Jon Wiener's on talk radio address the revivalism of the right...
...I am not much excited by attacks on their pusillanimity...
...Instead, the electorate as a bloc moved rightward, shedding voters on the left (voting rates were down among blacks, organized workers, women, and Jews) and picking up new voters on the right...
...The withdrawal of left voters was matched, roughly, by the arrival of right voters—and these two together made the turn...
...A fierce populist rhetoric co-exists easily with an extraordinary deference to the wealthy and powerful few...
...It's not the case that large numbers of people changed their political minds last November...
...This revivalism displays the strength of old-fashioned religion, which the left has always disparaged, and the usefulness of old-fashioned technologies, long ago abandoned by the left's political and cultural leaders...
...The right turn is not the result of a mass conversion...
...We are watching a radical demobilization of leftist social forces, which leaves large numbers of Americans frighteningly vulnerable to corporate power, increasingly backed by the state...
...The actual electorate was something above a third of the potential electorate...
...But why is the co-existence so easy...
...M.W...
...It also leaves liberal politicians beating a hasty retreat...
...In longer articles in this issue, David Plotke uses the Lani Guinier case to examine contemporary racial politics...
...So the populism that Sean Wilentz analyzes and David Bromwich denounces is a minority populism...
...We will carry more articles on these issues in the Summer and Fall Dissents, for the right's mobilization was in large part directed against blacks and welfare recipients...
...Non-voting on the left reflects larger social facts: the decline of the unions, the virtual collapse of the civil rights movement, the failure of environmentalists and feminists to produce strong, politically disciplined constituencies...
...We don't know the reach of its fears and resentments...
...We will do better to focus on its underlying causes...
...But the role of a quarterly is, in any case, to reflect on the meaning of such events, and this issue features a series of reflections on America's Right Turn...
...q SPRING • 1995 • 147...
...Jeff Isaac proposes a different response to this same problem, writing in the tradition of the old New Left...
...Liberals and leftists will have to defend such vulnerable groups over the coming years, but our larger task is to incorporate them into a new political public, a wider electorate that will be capable, one day, of turning the country again...
...Evelyn Brodkin describes the process that turned the war against poverty into a war against welfare...
...Harold Meyerson looks at some of those causes and at the kinds of governmental programs that might reverse their effects...
...The left's failure is intellectual as well as political...
...How local churches and radio stations fell into the hands of the right is a story yet to be told...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
