Letters
Misreadings Editors: I write on two matters. The first is to apologize to Jeffrey C. Isaac and Dissent's readers. In my response (Winter 2003) to his review of Frances Stoner Saunders's The...
...But there is something about it that bothers me...
...The Republicans, in contrast, feed off a larger conservative movement that has ideas and aggressively pushes them...
...He told me of a congressional district in Tennessee where, according to the party's polling, a majority of Democratic primary voters supported posting the Ten Commandments in the schools...
...But aren't the market forces I criticized gobbling up our national pastime...
...Second, Ken Brociner, in his letter to the editor (Winter 2003), alternately taxes the Nation with being "all over the place" and "frequently strident and dogmatic...
...He went to high school in southern California, where he became active in the Upton Sinclair EPIC movement...
...Last December, I was talking with a Democratic operative about the midterm elections...
...He was a man of deep compassion, an activist, writer, organizer, humanist, and friend...
...Since they don't know how to defend their positions on issues to the public or how to answer the conservatives' arguments, they lose or go to the right (and still lose...
...He retired to Santa Cruz, California, in the early 1980s, where he joined the local Democrats and stayed active in both local and national causes until his last days...
...Here's an example...
...But then, this is true of the broad left in general: by and large it has no coherent intellectual framework, just a bunch of moral stances (against greed, for compassion, 110 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 fairness, diversity, and so on...
...They don't have an alternative conception of national security...
...Vision wins if it answers the concerns of a majority of voters (and if it is pressed aggressively, which we all agree is a huge Democratic problem...
...The conservative Democrats share an outlook that is fundamentally similar to the Republicans...
...Well, Democratic liberals may sometimes stand for the wrong principles—his point about their opposition to welfare reform is well taken—but they do stand for principles...
...The reason the Democrats don't know how to defend the rights of the working class is that there isn't a working class anymore, in the old sense...
...I consider myself a realist as well as a liberal, but I'm finding it hard to make common cause with people bouncing all over the political map...
...Misreadings Editors: I write on two matters...
...The result of their shift has been dramatic: now Jonathan Chait can write, with only mild exaggeration, "they couldn't muster a majority to ban private ownership of tactical nuclear weapons...
...In 2000, Al Gore lost votes in the Ohio Valley in part, perhaps, DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 11 09 LETTERS because voters there were roused by the National Rifle Association's appeal to defend their "right to bear arms...
...JEFFREY SCHEUER New York, New York Jim Sleeper Replies Not since George Will's last paean to baseball has anyone but Jeff Scheuer proclaimed it the true name of our desire...
...On Spineless Democrats Editors: I am in general agreement with Michael Tomasky's argument ("Calling a Truce," Winter 2003) that Democratic liberals and moderates must reconcile for the general good of the party and of the country...
...He attended the University of California-Berkeley, became a full-fledged socialist, and soon after a Trotskyist, siding with the Schachtman faction...
...He touched many lives and will be remembered...
...Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan had visions, as did George McGovern...
...You just have to understand, he told me, how deeply conservative some parts of this country are...
...Throughout his career, he always maintained his socialist convictions and connections with the local labor movement...
...In contrast, it seems to me at least, too many Democratic moderates are unprincipled and simply respond to whatever hot buttons right-wing interest groups and their Republican allies decide to push among voters—typically, I've noticed, among white/rural/southern voters...
...But I'm not so sure that vision will "win every time, no matter what it is...
...Only one of these characterizations can be true...
...But the intellectual question at the center is this: Is the ability to accommodate a range of opinion on an issue perforce a sign of lack of principle...
...I agree wholeheartedly that Democrats have no "intellectual framework" today, but I suggest that developing one can only come out of a frank recognition of today's social conditions and an effort to find the liberal political potential within them...
...JOE GLADSTONE Santa Cruz, Calif...
...It's true that having an alternative vision will not guarantee victory—it's still necessary to persuade the public—but in a contest between vision and nonvision, vision will win every time...
...ELLEN WILLIS New York, New York Michael Tomasky Replies To William Hixson: Your point about running up the white flag on gun control is a good one...
...that is, an actual social base...
...To Ellen Willis: quite right, the Democrats are supine...
...And they don't understand that every time they move nervously to the center they are relocating the center somewhere to the right of where it was...
...The response of Democratic moderates...
...But give me baseball, or give me death...
...It's no contest...
...I worship, and am often humbled, in its green cathedrals...
...that is, pro-corporate and socially conservative, but without the Republicans' dynamism...
...Sleeper's intriguing model of what it means to be a good American leaves out one "salvific" thing that redeems wayward atheists and dissenters...
...Re-reading his words, I realize that I was wrong...
...I unfairly intimated that he had argued for restricting our critical thought...
...East Lansing, Michigan Editors: Michael Tomasky is missing the point ("Calling a Truce," Winter 2003...
...Call me cosmopolitan, Jewish, even leftist...
...Gordon was the son of Congregationalist missionaries in Bulgaria and came here in the middle of the 1930s...
...Or is it possible, instead, that it might be a sign of the existence of a broad and robust (if cantankerous) coalition...
...I wouldn't expect Will to protest, but how about the rest of us...
...Elephants and Baseball Editors: Jim Sleeper's portrait ("Whose Elephant?," Winter 2003) of the American left and Jewish cosmopolitanism as somehow alien to the idea of patriotism is mistaken...
...If I understand him correctly, Tomasky reiterates the point that, to regain credibility, the Democrats must stand for something...
...So, what is a national party to do in the face of such information...
...They don't know how to combat the ideological offensive of the right against the very concept of economic equality and public goods, or how to explain why individual freedom and sexual equality should be defended against "family values...
...In 1950, he became editor of its newspaper, Labor Action...
...In my response (Winter 2003) to his review of Frances Stoner Saunders's The Cultural Cold War (Summer 2002...
...That's Democratic primary voters...
...The Democrats' basic problem is not disunity or failure to split the difference on particular issues but failure to be a party of opposition, to make a critique of the Republican vision of what American society should be and offer an alternative...
...America's true glory remains accessible to us sinners: not a shining city on a hill, but a diamond with a hill...
...Abandon the cause of gun control, which Bill Clinton had so notably championed...
...Many liberal Democrats on the coasts, I guess, would say let them go...
...Fighting to the End Editors: Last October, one of the few remaining socialists of the 1930s, Gordon Haskell, died at the age of eighty-five...
...The New Deal arose out of a newly vibrant working class, civil rights from a confluence of black moral petition and white empathy...
...WILLIAM B. HIXSON, JR...
...They have no ideas about how to defend the rights of workers or social welfare in an age where transnational corporations are calling the shots...
...Even the idea of compromising on issues, whether within one's own party or with the perceived position of voters, only makes sense if you know what you are compromising: that is, if there's some basic framework of ideas and aims you are referring to...
...The liberal Democrats are still living off the legacy of the thirties and the sixties but have no intellectual framework to make sense of the past thirty years...
...unions have a fraction of their old power, and lots of unionized workers probably back, say, posting the Ten Commandments in the schools...
...Sometime in the middle 1950s, Gordon changed course and joined the Democratic Party in Brooklyn Heights and for the next twenty or so years advanced a progressive platform, was active in the civil rights movement, and helped to found the Democratic Socialists of America and the Association for Union Democracy...
...Neither of those bases exists today on a broad scale, nor does anything that can create a massive progressive movement...
...To me, getting 51 percent of vote in an election and keeping dangerous people out of power is a principle, a pretty grand one in fact, and I wish more Democrats and liberals and leftists thought that way...
...And to do that, it seems to me, it has to arise out of something real...
...NORMAN BIRNBAUM Washington, D.C...
...I believe that to some extent "principle" has been fetishized, converted into a rationale for defeat...
...I don't...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
