LETTERS
Letters Editors: Jeffrey Wasserstrom ("Distortions in the China Debate," Summer 1997) accuses National Review of running a racist anti-Asian cover as part of a right-wing campaign against...
...In 1994, when voters turned out the Democrats, it was the moderates who were more likely to lose: 25 percent lost their elections, a very high rate for incumbents, compared with 8 percent of liberals--a rejection of the New Democrat philosophy rather than traditional liberalism...
...In 1988 several of NLR's editors and contributors played a role in launching Charter 88, a citizens' movement aimed at achieving eight important democratic reforms including a Bill of Rights, replacement of first-past-the-post elections by proportional representation, and a Scottish Parliament...
...q Editors: Ruy Teixeira ("Finding the Real Center," Dissent, Spring 1997) presents the differing claims of Stan Greenberg (Campaign for America's Future) and Mark Penn ( Democratic Leadership Council) as to why Clinton's "centrist" position brought success in 1996...
...Another was by Peter Wilby, who, as a recent editor of the Independent on Sunday, could claim some credentials as a "center-left" journalist and candidate for the "popular front of the mind...
...Teixeira gives his own opinion of why Clinton was successful and why Democrats in Congress gained seats but fell short of retaking the House, and concludes that Democrats can increase electoral success by forging a different type of centrism that captures the best of both the Old and New Democrat traditions...
...What we know now is that the non-centrist Old Democrat approach has brought the most electoral success...
...As Neal Ascherson pointed out in the Independent on Sunday there was also a clear link between this work and Will Hutton's highly popular critique of the stranglehold over Britain's political economy exercised by a still oligarchic state made in his best-selling book The State We're In, Mandler may not consider democratic reform a proper concern for his "popular front of the mind" and was no doubt thinking of the critiques of New Labour that NLR has published...
...A distinctive feature of the NLR since the sixties has been its critique of the undemocratic structures of the U.K...
...I pointed out that the China debate has created strange political bedfellows of late and that it often confounds traditional visions of a clear right-left split, as well as raises problems for those who assume that they will find opposing views on China expressed in magazines associated with divergent points on the political spectrum...
...Perhaps a combination of the Old and New Democrat approach that Teixeira speaks of would best win elections, but that is merely speculation at this point...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...It was a caricature of three white politicians shown, very plausibly, as soliciting bribes from Asian sources...
...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...
...In another unhappy phrase, Mandler chides British intellectual journals with not being "close to the masses...
...There are complex questions in the modern world that left intellectuals have a duty to address at whatever level is required to clarify them...
...In 1996, while too few Democrats lost to draw conclusions, as in 1994, liberals won a higher percentage of the vote than did moderates...
...We ran several editorials to this effect, a cover story by Ambassador Owen Harries, and a cover illustration that caricatured three white conservatives tripping over their swords in a rush to adopt bellicose anti-China attitudes...
...Many individuals and publications have called for China's MFN status to be revoked and embraced "containment" ideas, and have not created or published caricatures or poems that play on racist or anti-Asian imagery...
...It was in this context, in fact, that I mentioned Terrill's piece in NR and Orville Schell's in the Nation...
...interests...
...FALL • 1997 • 127...
...Although our results do not speak directly to the presidential election, we believe that the political mood of the country is better judged by hundreds of races than by one, albeit presidential, race...
...But his claim that NLR is to be associated with a sectarian politics remote from real life is demonstrably false...
...Editor Had John O'Sullivan not decided to write his letter, I might never have perused again the issue of National Review in question (March 24, 1997...
...And I would not have come across the short poem on page 8 entitled "Chinese Water Torture," attributed to one W. H. Von Dreele, which I have now added to my growing file of recent works that invoke phrases or use visuals disturbingly reminiscent of the days when Fu Manchu serials played in American movie theaters...
...It is true that, owing in part to limits of space, I did not separate as neatly as I probably should have two trends that should be differentiated: (1) the increasing prevalence in American popular media of images that (albeit in some cases no doubt inadvertently) breathe new life into the Yellow Peril tradition of demonization (through the use of phrases such as "Chinese Water Torture," for example) and (2) the increasing prevalence of calls for shifts toward "containment" strategies by people convinced that the current Beijing regime poses a grave threat to U.S...
...These analyses have implications as well for how Democrats can win congressional elections...
...What makes the National Review cover objectionable is precisely the fact that, in an attempt to ridicule three non-Asian public figures, it drapes them in clothing and gives them physical attributes that are linked in the Western imagination with Asians and Asian-Americans...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...one of the most pointed critiques we have published was, in fact, by Conrad Russell, who, as well as being a distinguished historian, is a Liberal Democrat spokesman in the House of Lords...
...Center-Left' Journalism in Britain Today" (Spring 1997...
...Of course the thinking of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Anthony Barnett was only one strand in the formation of this movement, but most would agree that it was an important one...
...O'Sullivan's other points are more sensible...
...In marginal districts, where the previous election had been close, conventional wisdom says that candidates must move to the political center to win—yet here the 17percentage point gap between moderates and liberals increased to a 27-point difference...
...q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Does he mean that he would not consider "racist" an illustration accompanying a story about white politicians attempting to raise money in the black community that presented the fund-raisers involved as having very thick lips, sporting Afros, and eating watermelon...
...Since Mandler has something disobliging to say about every one of the journals he mentions, I suppose I should be glad that he commends New Left Review for continuing "to pump out its bimonthly ration of Marxist structuralism" and for emerging "fortified" from the editorial re-shuffle of a few years back...
...state...
...I would myself say that the work on pensions published in NLR and Soundings begins to lay the basis for a new political economy and that it could eventually turn out to be as useful to popular campaigning as the "Nairn-Anderson" theses on the British state...
...Still, it is possible for a magazine to take a stand for extension of China's status as a Most Favored Nation trading partner and against "containment" (as O'Sullivan's has) while simultaneously contributing to the first trend...
...The movement subsequently attracted fifty thousand members, provoked much public discussion, and helped to change the Labour Party's position on a number of constitutional and libertarian questions with a commitment to a referendum on electoral reform...
...These two trends reinforce one another in various ways...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...However, it is far from being the case that only "Marxist structuralists" have problems with New Labour...
...In short, Wasserstrom's article was one of the more egregious "distortions in the China debate" that his title promised...
...Finally, I did not claim that the anti-MFN crusade was a "right-wing" one or state that the National Review cover I found so objectionable was created as an accompaniment to Ross Terrill's obituary for Deng...
...And our consistently "pro-European" stance already looks more relevant to social advance than Labour's historic insular tendency...
...As grateful as I am to O'Sullivan, I find it hard to take seriously his argument that the controversial and much discussed magazine cover (I am not the only one who has publicly criticized it) is neither "racist" nor "anti-Asian," simply because the main people being mocked on it are white politicians...
...They found that over the last two congressional elections, liberal Democratic incumbents won 95 percent of their races...
...Wouldn't he think "antiSemitic" a drawing involving Jewish contributors (or even Israeli business people) that presented non-Jewish politicians as having large noses and wearing yarmulkes...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...Our cover was neither "racist" nor "anti-Asian...
...The study, co-authored by Neil Wollman and Leonard Williams of Manchester College, correlated electoral outcomes with congressional incumbents' political ideology, based on ratings by the American Conservative Union, Americans for Democratic Action, and National Journal...
...And as for the post-Mao China debate, National Review has been a strong supporter of renewing MFN and, more broadly, of drawing China into an international community whose rules and conventions would be incentives for better Chinese behavior in human rights, trade, and foreign policy...
...One can find in both periodicals pieces by China specialists who belong to the same select group singled out for praise in The Coming Conflict with China, simply because they have said or done things that have earned them the wrath of Beijing...
...The story it illustrated was not Ross Terrill's obituary of Deng Xiaoping, but, as the cover itself made clear, Rich Lowry's guide to the Clinton fund-raising scandal...
...Sadly, I agree with Blackburn that NLR's "new political economy" is likely to be as useful to popular campaigning as the "Nairn-Anderson theses...
...Beyond polling data presented in the article, we would like to present the results of research, based directly on elec126 • DISSENT Letters toral outcomes, that speaks to the issue and favors the Greenberg/CAF "Old Democrat" approach for success...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Letters Editors: Jeffrey Wasserstrom ("Distortions in the China Debate," Summer 1997) accuses National Review of running a racist anti-Asian cover as part of a right-wing campaign against renewing China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status in particular, and against the Yellow Peril in general...
...Editors: I am writing to take exception to Peter Mandler's article "A Popular Front of the Mind...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
