Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
It has been said about Dissent's editors and writers that we turn to culture only when politics is impossible for us, when the left is defeated or in the doldrums. Cultural criticism is an...
...And the complex question of crime and crime-fighting is certainly an issue of that sort, where center-left candidates have had a hard time figuring out not only what they ought to say but what they are prepared to do...
...Articles in this issue on Meyer Schapiro, Times Square, and the new Roosevelt Memorial in Washington suggest the range we will aim for...
...But we mean now to address in a more consistent way the tendencies of American (and global, which is partly the same thing) cultural life...
...The easiest example of these changes is the large number of articles on mass culture that appeared in the magazine in the 1950s, dropping to near zero in the course of the sixties...
...Cultural criticism is an antidote for, or a diversion from, political pessimism and incapacity...
...Michael Tomasky offers a strong critique of their positions, which is strongly criticized in turn by three of the left's most knowledgeable writers on these questions...
...The Arguments section continues to be one of the most popular parts of the magazine, and we are tempted to crowd everything into it—for isn't everything in Dissent an argument...
...The two are autonomous...
...most of us, indeed, accept Todd Gitlin's hostile account of that replacement in his piece on "cultural studies" in the Spring 1997 issue...
...Maybe we are repeating this old story with our latest return to cultural criticism—begun in the last few issues and fully apparent in this one...
...We have covered the culture/canon/science wars, though always from a distance generated by our uneasiness with both sides in those mostly academic struggles...
...But we will try to confine it to debates about issues critical to the self-understanding and programmatic commitments of the left...
...the two are closely related...
...The same ambiguous connection that we have long recognized between politics and economics exists also between political and cultural activity...
...But as soon as there is any sort of revival, the smallest sense of possibility, we are quick to turn away from literature, art, music, architecture, and popular culture, and come back to "real" politics as if to our natural vocation...
...We will attempt both assessment and criticism in coming issues in a series of articles on the problems of European social democracy...
...And we have written, more sporadically, about the reflection of politics in the mass media, and about the effects of the media on political behavior...
...The magazine has to include both, on the understanding that culture is expressive of politics and that politics is an enactment of culture...
...Two of our editors, Nicolaus Mills and George Packer, will take primary responsibility for an ongoing coverage of cultural events and artifacts, achievements and disasters...
...Yes and no...
...M.W...
...Are we, then, in the political doldrums...
...Only a madman could write glowingly about American politics right now...
...In Winter 1998, we will present a redesigned Dissent to our readers: logo, cover, pages, all made over...
...So we don't want cultural criticism to replace politics...
...Of course, we have been writing about culture for a long time insofar as it plays a part in identity politics and "multiculturalism...
...q FALL • 1997 • 3...
...We will approach the year 2000 with the "content of our character" unchanged but newly dressed up for the occasion...
...But with center-left governments in much of Europe, there is certainly room for a little tough-minded optimism—and then for articles that assess the opportunities opened up by recent electoral victories (in Portugal, Italy, Britain, and France) and criticize the sometimes faltering will to seize them...
...and the same dissent from conventional (left and right) accounts of that connection is necessary in both cases...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
