EDITOR'S PAGE
Cohen, Mitchell
Bill Clinton has chosen the phrase "vital center" to characterize his second term. It's half apt and half deceptive. True, the election was a contest between his "center" and the "right." While...
...Dissent will continue to play its part, initiating in the spring a series reevaluating what it means to be "on the left...
...If the welfare reform is any indication of the future, one can only wonder: how many people will be thrown off "the bridge to the twenty-first century...
...Yes, certainly, it is for the better that Clinton defeated Dole...
...The reinvigoration of the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney's leadership has, indeed, been the most heartening development on the national scene...
...One encouraging venture, the refashioning of ties between intellectuals and labor, was initiated at a teach-in at Columbia University in October...
...Lewis points out that organized labor was the sole energetic liberal force on the hustings this past fall...
...So we need to appreciate just where the "vital center" of the 1990s lies...
...and that (2) the author was convinced that the restoration of "business to political power in this country would have the calamitous results that have generally accompanied business control of the government"—a point likely to be ignored if your treasury secretary is Robert Rubin, your chief of staff is Erskine Bowles, and most of the liberals from your previous administration are seeking employment elsewhere...
...But the fact is that the "center" Bill Clinton chases is, after the Reagan era, so much to the "right" of where it once was that old-style liberals are pretty far "left" on the contemporary spectrum...
...Read it and you'll find that (1) the "center" was then defined as "modern American liberalism," that creature Mr...
...On the other hand, two distinguished political theorists, Anne Phillips and Iris Young, make separate, forceful arguments against misconstruing "the politics of difference...
...Just consider the expression "vital center...
...Can we pull the center back to, well, the center...
...Two of its principal organizers, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, assess its promise in our pages...
...After Gitlin comes Georgia representative John Lewis in conversation with Sean Wilentz...
...It was the title of a celebrated book published five decades ago by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Only a sectarian could relish the latter in the White House with—or without, for that matter—Republican control of Congress...
...following them comes philosopher Richard Rorty's address to its participants together with excerpts from Sweeney's speech...
...Can a "universalizing" political vision be fashioned out of the needs of working Americans...
...Coalition politics, Young urges, needs to rest on an intelligent understanding of human distinctions rather than pseudouniversalism...
...Troubling issues are raised by Zelda Bronstein's account of divisions on the left concerning California's Proposition 186, which aimed at a single-payer health system...
...While a good many people voted for him out of fear for Social Security and Medicare, he was ill-inclined to remind them that these were "liberal" policies...
...These sorts of contentions will undoubtedly animate the left as it redefines itself at the end of the millennium...
...Still, the agenda of the reelected incumbent (and his vice president) reveals how successful the right, from Reagan to Gingrich, has been...
...and then further left...
...M.C...
...Neither was he pressured to do so, since liberals and the left were not much to be seen...
...Clinton flees as conspicuously as possible...
...WINTER • 1997 • 5...
...Just what "inclusive" politics entails has been cause for controversy on the left, especially with the rise of identity politics and multiculturalism...
...This may well take "a strong infusion of new fact," as Todd Gitlin remarks in his thoughtful appraisal of the elections, which opens this issue of Dissent...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
