Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
I THINK THAT I am in favor of the fourth way, or maybe the fifth; anyway, I am sure there is a "way" coming that will be better than all the others. The advantage of four and five is that they...
...The range of difference in countries like this one is so wide that it is likely to require political and constitutional arrangements more radical than anything proposed for the United States...
...Perhaps the greatest virtue of the article is that it puts this past year of American politics into perspective...
...in part because it provides, in almost all the human-rights cases, most of the prosecutors or the would-be prosecutors...
...Maybe we need to pick and choose across the whole spectrum...
...Sometimes it doesn't mean much...
...The recognition of value in difference is something that the left has to come to grips with...
...And then the fourth...
...M.W...
...Sometimes, perhaps, it is best, all things considered, not to go after them...
...n I am in Israel for the first half of 1999, on leave from my academic job (but not from Dissent), and I have already been invited to three conferences on multiculturalism...
...maybe we need more than one spectrum...
...The advantage of four and five is that they will force politicians and political intellectuals to abandon the triadic mode, in which they identify two equally unattractive polar opposites and then plant themselves firmly in the center...
...thirdness is a merchandising slogan, useful precisely because no one quite knows what is being sold...
...Not all political prosecutions are merely political, narrowly partisan...
...there really are criminals out there, and it is important to think carefully about how one should go after them...
...sometimes amnesty and amnesia may be the only way to peace and democratic stability...
...That would make a modest third way...
...There are hard and deep questions here, with which the left especially has to wrestle, in part because it has provided, at least in the Latin American cases, most of the victims...
...At the same time, truth to tell, we have friends on the third way, and we hope they are after something...
...The difference politics that Linda Gordon both sympathizes with and criticizes is flourishing here in ways that are very dangerous for any kind of left politics: they make the American debates look relatively easy...
...Our authors give some indication of what they should be after: greater equality (or, at least, no further growth of inequality), some limits on the global market, protection for workers' rights, defense of existing welfare services...
...We also have to defend the value of a shared citizenship and a common life...
...For the moment, however, large numbers of people on the left, in many different countries, want to be third, and we need to understand exactly what that means: hence the special section in this issue...
...n Anyone who is interested in the wrongdoing of political leaders should read Marguerite Feitlowitz's article on the long struggle to bring the former military rulers of Argentina and Chile to justice...
...Still, the position that Gordon has worked her way to over some twenty years looks wonderfully attractive from Jerusalem...
...but it can't get stuck there...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
