Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
DIssENT BEGINS the new year—and moves toward the new millennium—with a new look. It is our second "make-over" in forty-four years. We think it is fresh and attractive, and we hope our...
...It usually has less to do with the concerns of today's family life than with putting women back "in place...
...On the other hand, he insists that markets do have real value—"in their place...
...In this issue, James B. Rule debunks market utopianism, warning that it is often "a Trojan horse" for anti-egalitarian policies...
...n A Dissent left is many-sided and perpetually revisionist...
...n Paul Berman vivisects a shrill gramophone mind in "A Fanatic's Journey...
...That democratic socialist George Orwell had it right when he wrote, "The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment...
...Liberty, equality, and solidarity, he contends, depend on "the vitality of associational life...
...Now that's an idea that doesn't conform to our times...
...They are, we're told, nature's panacea for all ills...
...DISSENT / Winter 1998 1...
...Dissent readers know the type— the rancorous leftist who converts to rancorous rightist, just switching records, never skipping a beat (merely a thought...
...n Gramophone minds have, of late, been especially noisy about markets...
...Dissent continues its discussion of feminism with Alix Kates Shulman's reexamination of her controversial "Marriage Agreement" of 1969, proposing equality between the sexes in child care and housework...
...n Another fashionable, although deceptive, refrain is "family values...
...M.C...
...or two...
...So Dissent continues to question buzzwords—and buzz-ideas...
...n In Dissent's first issue, its founders proposed to "bring together intellectual sentiment against the blight of conformism...
...The sectarian centrist, a strange creature of the Clinton-Blair universe, is usually a Democrat or a Laborite who accepts the bottom lines drawn by Reagan-Thatcher and brands any skeptic to the left as insufficiently "modernized...
...It is a left that affirms while it demurs, as Michael Walzer does in arguing for the importance of pluralism in social democratic thinking...
...It's still our aim since, regrettably, this blight remains very much with us...
...But not by asserting left-wing dogma as the alternative to right-wing clichés or to what might be called "sectarian centrism...
...Walzer asks readers to imagine a "cooperative commonwealth" in which individuals have many options before them, "free from the domination of the wellborn, the wealthy, and the powerful...
...Or rather, in time, roughly 1950...
...A little polyphony makes a good antidote...
...We think it is fresh and attractive, and we hope our readers agree...
...n It's worth noting which forms of fanaticism become part of "normalcy" in times of conformity...
Vol. 45 • January 1998 • No. 1
