Editor's Page
Cohen, Mitchell
LOOK LEFT today and you will see intellectual crisis. Look first at the mainstream. Social democrats led governments across Europe in recent years. Their talk of a "third way" often displaced...
...n What of movements critical of neoliberal globalization...
...Discussion of serious matters such as nuclear proliferation was effectively hijacked...
...They are part of a left-thatneverlearns...
...It made a credible effort to balance socialist concerns with market exigencies: it enacted a thirty-five-hour work week, extended health insurance to poorer citizens, reduced unemployment by nine hundred thousand...
...Their talk of a "third way" often displaced social imagination...
...They rushed to be the "center" instead of trying to pull the center to the left...
...If the social democratic left is in deep crisis, and if the growth of right-wing populism in Europe is cause for considerable concern, it doesn't follow that the left-that-neverlearns offers an alternative...
...Now they are losing power or are in electoral jeopardy across the continent...
...Jeffrey W. Rubin's article on the evolution of the Latin American left, Jeffrey C. Isaac's reconsideration of the cultural cold war, and my own essay raise some troubling matters for the left...
...What does this mean...
...n Some "radicals" have a canned explanation of what's wrong: nobody is "radical enough...
...None of them addresses the events of September 11 directly, but they all imply what many people are thinking—that a lot of revision is needed if a meaningful left is to carry on...
...During the early years of the cold war, peace movements surfaced that somehow always "understood" Moscow but viewed all antiStalinists, even on the left, as "McCarthyist...
...We continue and broaden the effort in this issue...
...M .0...
...It follows only that extremes burgeon when democratic debate about social justice dissolves into a mythical "middle," and when an "end" is proclaimed to "ideology" and "history...
...A similar danger arises today if a 1960s-style third worldism (a legacy of the left-that-never-learns) hijacks the agenda of critics of neoliberalism...
...n The French Socialist Party seemed to be a partial exception...
...n Dissent has tried since September 11 to sharpen debate within the left...
...Trotskyists and Jean-Pierre Chevenement's faction did this in France, and "Refoundation Communists" did the same in Italy...
...Lionel Jospin failed to mobilize political support through social legislation and even fled the word "socialist" at election time...
...They have provoked vital arguments about really-existing capitalism and its impact on the world's poor...
...Siphoning off votes, Nader-like, so that governments are delivered into conservative hands...
...But it could not link these measures to a larger vision...
...But there are some worrisome developments...
...Indictment of global economic inequality is in danger of being conflated with intellectually corrupt efforts to "understand" Osama bin Laden and to turn Yasir Arafat into Nelson Mandela...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
