Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
THIS ISSUE marks forty-five years of Dissent. It is easy to imagine that our founders would have been a bit surprised if told back in 1954 that this magazine would still be a vigorous venture at...
...But best be in no rush to replace them with postmodern (tenured) torment...
...The lesson seems so obvious: if your end dictates appalling brutality (not to mention mass murder), then either you give it up or change it into something else—something that does not exact such means...
...n Dissent's anniversary coincides with another marker...
...It is a decade since the communist breakdown began...
...Our founders would undoubtedly be content that their old nemesis on the left, Stalinism and its progeny, self-destructed...
...They would be gratified, much so, that their radical democratic values still resonate...
...Surely they would have been cheered if reproaches to inequality and conformism were less relevant...
...It is easy to imagine that our founders would have been a bit surprised if told back in 1954 that this magazine would still be a vigorous venture at the century's close...
...The same can hardly be said of the current Republican leadership...
...Was its bankruptcy, its pillage of every precept the left should espouse so difficult to see?," they might query...
...This is not because we lack an all-encompassing response to issues like globalization (in fact we don't have one...
...Better to leave the formulas at a left-luggage repository for those who cleave to the unity of theory and patience...
...It's because formulas have substituted for left-wing ideas a little too often...
...No elaborate exegesis needed here, just oldfashioned humanism, just some democratic values...
...After all, they started with just enough money for a year's publication, and small, independent journals rarely have abundant staying power...
...stubborn concern for social suffering and for racial and gender discrimination...
...n On the other hand, Dissent's founders would also shake knowing if sorrowful heads at those folks—still at it, are they?—for whom anticommunism is intellectual Viagra...
...It seems to hate a president more than it cares for the country's political health...
...today's Republican majority has manufactured its own stink...
...complex questions about how to fashion a deeply democratic society, as much in social and economic structures as in political life...
...We don't offer formulaic answers...
...n Dissent continues to speak from the left unabashedly...
...Undoubtedly, they would be disheartened by the state of American democracy...
...n Dissent won't follow the herd of autonomous liberals that claims that distinguishing "left" from "right" is now meaningless...
...Moreover, they were well aware that their politics represented a minority position in mainstream intellectual life, as in the broader left...
...M.C...
...Dissent's founders understood a great deal about sectarian fanaticism, left and right...
...Instead, we'll continue to provide a pluralistic forum for left voices, concerns, and questions—reflective voices on behalf of a liberal but equality-friendly America...
...McCarthyism's malodor was still present when Dissent was founded...
...Or, in a different vein, with a muddled "Third Way" that would demobilize everyone—except capital, that is...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
