Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
WE DEVOTE this issue almost entirely to American politics, looking back to the disputed presidential election and forward to the administration of Bush II. The mix of articles is incomplete; we...
...But the pieces add up...
...Would that the Democratic champions of "working Americans" had similar courage in defense of their presumably different convictions...
...n Third, the courage of the Democrats is a real issue...
...And look for a sustained and serious campaign against the labor movement, which was Bush's most effective opponent last November...
...We also need to think about the potential electorate...
...The two parties have agreed among themselves to compete for 51 percent of 50 percent of the electorate...
...In the book section, Tom Edsall provides a useful, and sure to be disputed, account of the actual electorate...
...they make for some necessary selfreflection...
...Who are these people who have withdrawn from, or declined to enter, or (as Ruth Rosen suggests) been excluded from the political arena...
...But what we most need at this moment is partisan politics...
...n Fourth, the Greens made a difference, and so we have to rejoin the old leftist debate about third parties, as Sean Wilentz, Todd Gitlin, and Ellen Willis do with admirable energy...
...n There are four points that we begin to address here, and will continue to deal with...
...Al Gore's voters came from segments of the population (new immigrants, for example) likely to expand...
...First, the most extraordinary fact about the election and the current political scene is that half the people are absent...
...But I am fairly sure, and most of our writers agree, that Bush II will construct a centrist facade and serve as a front for a hard-right administration...
...But the left should not accept that agreement, just as we should not make our peace with the more general decline in political participation and organizational membership...
...Because of the difference the Greens made, they may not be much of a factor in 2004...
...M.W...
...Still, given the current leadership and programmatic posture of the Democratic Party, the question of thirdness won't go away...
...we can't cover everything at once...
...The country is deeply divided, and the Democratic half probably has the greater chance for growth over the next decades...
...The rest of the world, for the moment, is slighted...
...After four years of Republican environmentalism, any Democrat is likely to look good...
...n Second, an election that produced a statistical tie might be expected to lead to a centrist, assiduously bipartisan government...
...But to seize this opportunity, the party has to play for bigger stakes than 51 percent of 50 percent...
...His proposed tax cut is one of the purest pieces of class interest legislation that we have seen for years...
...They will continue to be strongly tempted to play the bipartisan game...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
