Letters
Distinguishing Among Ideas Editors: In "Why Intellectual Conservatism Died" (Winter 1995), Michael Lind raises some important points about the difficulty of maintaining the independence critical...
...Point (3) of that note says, "Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...Buchanan favors a "white America" protected from "Third World" (nonwhite) immigrants, whereas I favor a policy of restricted but continuing immigration from Latin America and Asia—a policy that, over time, would ensure that a majority of Americans would be nonwhite (according to today's crude racial categories...
...TDC's address is P.O...
...Few people, even slaveholders, denied outright the claim that in some sense wage workers instead of slaves might pick cotton...
...Finally, it is inaccurate to write, as Postrel does, that my "policy prescriptions on trade and immigration" in my forthcoming book The Next American Nation (The Free Press, Summer 1995) are "indistinguishable from those of Pat Buchanan...
...But this misunderstands the nature of McCarthyism...
...And only now do I see what must have happened...
...430 • DISSENT Letters The syllabic expansion of my very simple word is explained in an insidious note that appears in every issue called "To Our Contributors...
...The remark I quoted, which is cited in a TDC flyer, complains that "recent literary theory is so rarely accorded the privilege of representing itself in nonacademic forums that journalists, disgruntled professors, embittered ex-graduate students and their family and friends now feel entitled to say anything they like about the academy...
...Abolitionism bore with it a worldview that challenged some of the era's most outworn shibboleths and offered striking universalist claims: that human inequality was unnatural, that race was no measure of human dignity, that all human beings would work best when not compelled to by force, to name a few...
...But he cites none of these instances, probably because there is nothing else in Democratic Culture resembling that letter, as Zavarzadeh and Morton (who are not TDC members, and were replying to an article that attacked them) would be the first to tell you...
...He rejects this analogy by noting that McCarthyism "traded in spurious charges...
...Rather, we argue that the exaggerated PC anecdotes are hardly evidence that a totalitarian left controls American campuses...
...ALEX LICHTENSTEIN Miami, Fla...
...A few critical reviews" is not an accurate description of what the editors were up to with Sommers's book...
...For more than two decades, Maciel and other members of the Cardoso government supported a regime that committed countless human rights violations, plundered the national economy, and rendered state social services virtually dysfunctional...
...This is nonsense...
...And in the intellectual world, how one arrives at one's conclusions is as important as, if not more important than, what those conclusions are...
...I am writing this letter because this is the second time in a very short period that I have discovered that one of my words has been altered on its way to print by a copy editor in the imagined interest of the struggle for women's equality...
...q SUMMER • 1995 • 431...
...The dire straits of the left today ought to inspire us to seek common ground rather than always blowing up each other's words...
...Conant's main complaint is quite legitimate: TDC is still too insular an organization...
...Therefore, if you write for Dissent we urge you first, to do so in a spirit of democratic inclusiveness that takes into account linguistic research and developments of the past twenty-five years (see The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, by Casey Miller and Kate Swift, for starters...
...MICHAEL BERUBE Urbana, Ill...
...60204...
...Like many of your loyal readers, I was worried that losing Irving Howe would cripple the magazine...
...As the author of a thoughtful book on American culture whose policy prescriptions on trade and immigration are indistinguishable from those of Pat Buchanan, Lind would do well to respect that distinction...
...But in glancing with authorial satisfaction at my own piece, I noticed that, in the version that ran in your pages (or let me say "our" pages, since I sit on the board of editors), a word that I had not written managed to appear two times...
...Lind is falsely nostalgic if he thinks the social issues are new to conservative intellectuals...
...I question the writers' main contention that we on the left ought to cease "blowing up each other's words...
...The traditional culture of the independent left is ceaseless and rigorous criticism...
...Calling them "virtually powerless in academia" almost gives them victim status—but are they only "virtually" tenured...
...I particularly enjoyed George Packer's article, "Why We Are in Haiti," Joanne Barkan's "Welfare State, Fare Thee Well...
...That word was "humanity," employed as the subject of a sentence...
...The writers are co-coordinators of Teachers for a Democratic Culture...
...In my essay, I mentioned the favorable reception of Epstein by the neoconservatives only to demonstrate the drift of those former integrationist liberals toward the far right on matters of civil rights—not with the intent of impugning the reputation of Epstein, a distinguished libertarian scholar...
...consideration is not the same as orchestrated denunciation...
...This disdain for the uncredentialed strikes me as insiderish, smug, and misconceived...
...Dissent's editors and writers wrote, unusually, in the first person...
...But I am puzzled that he's puzzled...
...Though it is true, as she says, that the social issues are not "new to conservative intellectuals," it is also the case that in recent years they have moved from the margins to the center of conservative concern—in part, as she suggests, because they provide former anticommunists with an "outlet for their energies and us-against-them impulses...
...We believe that the well-funded campaign for Sommers's book produced an uncritical acceptance of her arguments in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, on the cover of National Review, in the prime-time coverage of CBS's Eye to Eye and ABC's 20/20, in interviews published in Penthouse and Men's Health, and even in a report in the illustrious National Enquirer...
...Instead, perhaps I could ask the readers of Dissent, if they're really interested in helping Teachers for a Democratic Culture debunk and expose the New Right, to join TDC and contribute cash and essays to our fledgling, underfunded enterprise...
...Comparing Democratic Culture to Heterodoxy (a low blow...
...Humanity," in the specific sense in which it was used, is a four-syllable latinate near-synonym for the perfectly clear one-syllable Anglo-Saxon word "man," which is the word that i actually wrote...
...I thought it would be OK in intellectual circles to call this kind of illiterate garbage "illiterate garbage," so back in 1991, when I was a second-year assistant professor, I went ahead and did so in the pages of the Village Voice...
...TDC never claimed that campus "PC" has been "invented by the right...
...Oliver Conant Replies: Michael Berube is a witty and ingratiating writer and I have enjoyed his journalism...
...Gregory Jay would like to be understood as not having lumped what he now carefully calls the "views" of "various left-liberals," But in the original article he permits himself such expressions as "Schlesinger and company," and "the debilitating liberal-conservative convergence...
...Ironically, the diversity and individuality of Dissent's editors appeared most vividly in the issue that showcased tributes to Irving's memory...
...The writers' solicitude for Zavarzadeh and Morton, however, seems exaggerated...
...Michael Lind's "The Death of Intellectual Conservatism," and Susannah Heschel's "Feminists in Cairo," in the Winter 1995 issue...
...Conant accuses Democratic Culture of "propagating the pieties of advanced literary criticism," asserting that our pages provide "plentiful instances" of writing like the letter by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton...
...Anyone who has spent a week in Washington policy circles has seen the phenomena he describes—and not only on the right...
...besides, it's not as if our more informed critics haven't found plenty to criticize in contemporary theory anyway...
...I also erred in suggesting that TDC believes that campus PC has been "invented" by the right...
...One of the greatest monuments to Irving Howe is this unspoken evidence that he did, in fact, succeed in orchestrating a generational succession...
...MARCELO IRAJA DE ARAM HOFFMAN Richmond, Ind...
...To date, no woman has objected to inclusive language...
...q Politically Admirable, Grammatically Unsound Editors: I was happy to see my mini-essay on book indexing published on the last page of the Spring 1995 issue...
...Nom: The writer is editor of Reason magazine...
...As a historian of the South and slavery, what struck me full force was Rorty's example drawn from antebellum American history...
...With the left in current disarray, his practicality and issue-oriented political philosophy seemed appealing...
...when it comes to ideological intimidation, it is Zavarzadeh (not the conservatives on his campus) who regularly receives death threats...
...Should candidates for jobs in education be banned for past criticisms of American foreign policy...
...The selective use of libertarian arguments, in matters of race relations, by conservatives who reject libertarianism in other areas should arouse suspicion, not least among Postrel and her colleagues...
...The imputation that I "painted" him as an "enemy of democratic freedom" is preposterous...
...Conant says that the Spring 1993 essay on Johnetta Cole is "careless" because her opponents are accused of using "guilt by association tactics of the McCarthy Era...
...In lieu of contesting Hirschman's unduly optimistic claims, I would like to highlight some ugly truths about the Cardoso administration...
...deserve consideration," but blames Democratic Culture for printing too many attacks on the book...
...The idea that the antislavery movement's claim to a definition of jus428 • DISSENT Letters tice rested on the thin reed of "the cotton doesn't have to be picked by slaves, it could be done for wages" courts absurdity...
...Maxine Phillips Replies for the Editors: We, too, are happy that Dissent has room for small complaints, even those directed at other publishers...
...In fact, because Dissent is not dogmatic, we have a flexible policy, and always restore the original wording when an author believes that his meaning or melody has suffered...
...q Against Rorty's "Reductionism" Editors: I have often been led down the primrose path of pragmatism by Richard Rorty: until now...
...I was allowed to see a copy of the page proofs, and of course I should have noticed the change and should have inquired about it...
...Is the world suffering right now from worse oppressions than those that are inflicted on the English language by politically admirable and grammatically unsound copy editors...
...The last few issues have been lively, provocative, and thoughtful...
...and second, to read the galleys carefully when we send them to you...
...What made nineteenth-century abolitionists radical by any definition of the word was precisely their "synoptic vision" of human relations and social justice...
...Conant finds seething "ideological animus...
...There's nothing we'd like better than wider influence and broader distribution, and Dissent could help on both counts...
...But there is a place for small complaints, too...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...There is, indeed, a lot of vitality among conservative foreign-policy specialists...
...This is not McCarthyism, except perhaps in the Wonderland sense of words meaning whatever their holders wish them to mean...
...Publishing a few critical reviews of Sommers's errors (including her highly suspect statistic, repeated by Conant, that anorexia is linked to only fifty-four deaths a year) is an act of dissent of which we are proud...
...Inclusive language," in sum, is an Orwellian phrase...
...But his retort to Steven Lukes's insistence that the left is defined by its universalist impulses revealed the bald ahistoricism underlying Rorty's project...
...Hence, they found themselves with careers pinned to the conservative cause and only one outlet for their energies and us-againstthem impulses: the culture wars...
...The most egregious case in point: he describes University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein as "a legal theorist who argues that most federal laws against racial discrimination are unconstitutional—a view formerly associated with the John Birch Society rather than the neocons," thereby insinuating that Epstein and the Birchers occupy the same intellectual sphere...
...But in 1995 do we have to defend a policy of inclusive language...
...most adherents to theory do not...
...But because we have a long "lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Nor did they venture into the intricacies of economics...
...But my eye ran quickly down the column of print and the editorial change has come to my attention only now...
...And we do mean his...
...Powerful landowners, media barons, and the neoliberal elite strongly back the new president...
...Vice President Marco Maciel from the Liberal Front party (PFL) is what Brazilians refer to as a filho da ditadura, a puppet of the dictatorship...
...rather, Jay points to the fact of their common, puzzling failure to question the stories told by unreliable right-wing journalists...
...His piece expresses an animus toward the new academic left that, sadly, continues the unhelpful intramural squabbling between the professors and the journalists...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...It is true that people change, but it is highly unlikely that these authoritarian technocrats will suddenly champion social democracy...
...Dissent has kept the intellectual rigor and core values that Howe imbued it with, while broadening its use of analytic reporting and freeing the individual voices of its writers...
...Instead, we will challenge them on an intellectual level while we refute the right's myth that PC storm troopers now dominate American campuses...
...MIRIAM BENSMAN New York, N.Y...
...the question for both sides was what kind of society this transformation might entail, and what its claims to justice would be...
...Sometime between the submission of my article and its appearance in print, "man" had been changed—two times—into "humanity...
...We will continue to print disagreements with colleagues on the left, but we will not banish their voices from our pages...
...Dissent on TDC: A Dissent Editors: We welcome Oliver Conant's analysis of Democratic Culture in the Spring 1995 issue of Dissent...
...Elliot Sclar's piece on "Myths of Privatization" in Summer 1994 was a badly needed debunking of the new gospel...
...q Democratic Culture Wars Editors: How odd to find myself painted as a smug academic insider and an enemy of democratic freedom in Oliver Conant's generally fair-minded piece on Teachers for a Democratic Culture—and all because I once complained that most of the critics of American higher education don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes to contemporary literary theory...
...Conant contends that Christina Hoff Sommers's arguments in Who Stole Feminism...
...Box 6405, Evanston, Ill...
...Cardoso also draws a significant portion of his support from the oligarchy...
...q Reappraising Cardoso Editors: The most striking feature about "Social Democracy Moves South" (Spring 1995) is Albert 0. Hirschman's entirely uncritical appraisal of newly elected Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...He complains that Gregory Jay is guilty of "indiscriminate lumping of opponents" in an essay where he blames various left liberals (including the late Dissent editor Irving Howe) for "relying uncritically on sources like Dinesh D'Souza...
...readers could see just how diverse are their intellectual and political backgrounds, experiences on the left, and routes to joining Dissent's circle...
...Yes, and I am confident that, in the rest of this issue of Dissent, those other oppressions are being very intelligently addressed, and in bigger print than is used on this letters page...
...Thanks, Michael and Mitchell, yourselves part of that generational succession, for letting those diverse voices sing...
...GREGORY JAY JOHN K. WILSON GERALD GRAFF ED...
...Lind is correct in saying that "the loss of the Soviet enemy did not cause the right to crack up...
...But a lot of people drawn to the right by the fight against communism did not become foreign-policy experts...
...But I can't apologize for having asked that the academy's critics do some homework...
...Unlike the conservatives, she and her fellow libertarians have resisted the temptation to derive their policy views from the needs of an electoral coalition rather than from the first principles of a genuine political philosophy...
...Professor Berub6 is "accorded" the opportunity of representing the claims of theory because he writes well...
...May I congratulate Michael Walzer, Mitchell Cohen, and the editorial board for the superb job they have done...
...No enemies on the left" was a bad slogan in the old days, and it's no good now...
...But this passage does not lump together the views of this varied group...
...Michael Lind Replies: My thanks to Virginia Postrel for her kind words about my essay...
...q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...q And For a Change of Pace: Some Praise Editors: I've been reading Dissent for twenty years, since high school...
...Democratic Culture has printed many pieces criticizing real examples of "PC" by both the left and the right...
...NOTE...
...Rather than revealing the weaknesses and strengths of the new government, Hirschman simply reproduces Cardoso's campaign rhetoric...
...PAUL BERMAN New York, N.Y...
...To judge from my depiction in Conant's essay (and a similar rough sketch in Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom) I underestimated the prevalence of knee-jerk anti-academicism on the American left...
...Nor is a pragmatic economic nationalism, which, in appropriate circumstances, might inspire support for extensive trade liberalization and the delegation of authority to transnational economic agencies, to be confused with Buchanan's crude protectionism and his implausible concerns about the loss ofAmerican "sovereignty...
...To reduce this conflict to a "simple thought" about the efficiency of agricultural labor negates the history of the Civil War, emancipation, and ultimately, the civil rights movement...
...The new format is fun: who would ever have expected Dissent to print Paul Berman's Last Page on the joys of perusing book indexes or Nick Mills's piece on the baseball strike...
...In order to enact social reforms, Cardoso will have to overcome their opposition...
...Midge Decter's writings on the subject date at least to the 1970s, and her position has not changed...
...Cardoso has allied himself with some of the most reactionary parties in Brazilian political life...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...Inclusive language," in this context, means language that could not possibly be interpreted as referring only to males, for instance by a reader who chooses not to accept that, in English, words like "man," "he" and "his" can, in certain contexts, refer to a universal human, neither male nor female...
...Johnetta Cole was denied a political appointment because it was revealed that she held repellent political views well into the mid-eighties...
...So i fyou want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...The neoconservatives have not shifted their position on gays in particular or sex in general...
...In the New Yorker magazine last year I published an essay about the relations between African-Americans and American Jews, which, when it was reprinted by Delacorte in my own anthology of essays on that topic, was editorially "adjusted" away from the correct word "his" (in a context that clearly referred to a universal abstract person) in favor of the three-word formula "his or her" (which is a phrase that refers to people who are specifically male or female, therefore are less obviously to be regarded as abstractly universal...
...Distinguishing Among Ideas Editors: In "Why Intellectual Conservatism Died" (Winter 1995), Michael Lind raises some important points about the difficulty of maintaining the independence critical to an intellectual when engaged in partisan political battle...
...Moving portraits of a giant of American socialist thought, the tributes revealed the breadth and variety of the socialist intellectuals Irving had gathered around him...
...Gregory Jay, John K. Wilson, and Gerald Graff are quite right that the Stalinoid ranting in the letter of Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton is not on display elsewhere in their newsletter, and I am sorry I implied otherwise...
...His criticisms are instructive, although we wish his tone had better reflected the commitment he shares with us to counter the right's "culture war" agenda...
...Finally, and most important, Lind is too quick to condemn as nonintellectual those positions with which he happens to disagree...
...If the words in question amount to name-calling, posturing, and cant, then why not blow them up...
...Lukes is right: the left can do without this kind of reductionism in these times as well...
...What made McCarthyism so vile was the use of this association to condemn people who had done no wrong...
...In short, I not only arrive at my conclusions by a different method than Buchanan, but I arrive at quite different conclusions, though the differences may not impress libertarians for whom democratic socialists, social-market liberals, one-nation Tories, and authoritarian populists are all "statists" or "collectivists...
...The American Spectator's columns have always been riddled with antigay remarks...
...A few years back, people like Jerry Adler (in Newsweek) and Dinesh D'Souza (in the Atlantic Monthly) were claiming that campus gay-bashers were being forced to read "Gay Lit" instead of straight white guys like Plato and Shakespeare, and that it wasn't PC to deconstruct women's writing...
...As for Zavarzadeh and Morton, they are virtually SUMMER • 1995 • 429 Letters powerless in academia...
...Hirschman does not need to look north to find the enemies of social democracy—they occupy numerous posts in the Brazilian government...
...Richard Epstein is nothing if not intensely intellectual...
...That the left is in such "dire straits" today may in large part be due to its obsession with seeking common ground with fools, which in practice means signing on to the worst identity politics has on offer...
...In this case, it means jargon that is multisyllabically latinate—which, for most speakers of the English language, is harder, not easier, to understand...
...Inclusive language," that is, means the jargon of today...
...It seems unlikely that he will betray the same people who catapulted him into the presidential palace...
...VIRGINIA I. POSTREL Los Angeles, Calif...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
