Editor's Page

...Two of the reports in Politics Abroad deal with elections that Hitchens cites to support his claim that leftists should avoid lesser as well as greater evils, and both writers, Mitchell Cohen and Joanne Barkan, oppose his views...

...These are questions we will return to (and Jeff Isaac will respond to his critics in the Winter Dissent...

...In this country, too, surely, the attack on immigrants, the English Only agitation, the eagerness to cut mothers and children off welfare, the commitment to market discipline for everyone except the rich—all this forces us to engage with, but also, I think, to resist, Hitchens's argument...

...I am inclined to agree that grimness is the best starting point for any political analysis these days...

...Francis Fox Piven, Jim Rule and Susan Lambiase, Linda Gordon and Maria Cancian, writing before the new law was passed, explain its politics and its likely consequences, especially for women and children...

...That will depend on how weak we think we are and on how we stand vis-à-vis the "new" Democratic party...

...But we are not concerned here with how to vote in the presidential election, which doesn't seem a difficult (though it may be a painful) question, but with how to orient ourselves in a time when the left is politically weak...

...FALL • 1996 • 5...

...Though there apparently were strong voices within the administration calling for a veto, there weren't enough strong voices outside...

...Given the strength of the neofascists in Italy in the last few years, the victory of the Olive Tree coalition has to be heartening...

...And, obviously, if not, not...

...Joseph Blasi's playful but serious description of a re-foundedAmtrak suggests a program for "social" privatization...

...In an issue full of arguments, we have put Christopher Hitchens's lively reiteration of a classic left position, contempt for "lesser evilism," into the Arguments section all by itself, without the usual response...

...his own prescriptions hardly seem adequate to the situation he describes— as the responses to his piece argue...

...Given that weakness, President Clinton's refusal to veto the Republican welfare bill can't have been an unexpected disappointment for liberals and leftists...

...How should we imagine an economy "beyond" both state control and unregulated free enterprise...

...Harold Meyerson addresses these questions in the immediate context of a presidential year, Jeff Isaac in a broader historical perspective and with a more polemical intent: Isaac argues against the surge of optimism among American liberals that came with the realization that much of the country was resistant to the Republican "revolution" of 1994...

...What kind of politics should we be involved in right now...

...given the strength of similar types in Israel, the defeat of the Labor party is a bitter disappointment...

...But what follows from that is less clear...

...But while we are unhapppily defending this or that lesser evil, it is still important to think about what we would do if we could do whàt we want...

...If more of the thirteen million people on welfare voted, if they were organized, if the unions were better able to represent the working class as a whole, if the Democrats were still a mass party . . . if, if . . . the president would no doubt have found it in his heart to oppose the mean-spiritedness of the campaign against welfare...

...But the country isn't really resistant, he claims, to the general rightward drift, nor is it ready for a counter-mobilization...

...We welcome alternative accounts of how companies and corporations might best be governed...

...Hitchens is taking aim at most of the rest of the magazine, and many of the other pieces in this issue can be read as responses to his attack, possibly even George Packer's critique of radical snobbery, though that is directed at other writers...