Decades of Dissent

...The Web?—it sounds like J. Edgar Hoover's idea of a communist plot...

...You will find authors thinking about the end of communism, the growth of globalization, and the vicissitudes of America's superpower status...

...The 1960s was a decade of great idealism (for example, in the civil rights movement), but also bitter disappointments and acrimony, and a process of generational and intellectual mending on the left could only begin later, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the New Left was in shambles and the liberal left in retreat...

...Social imagination could and ought to draw everyday politics beyond "curdled realism" to novel possibilities, to innovation in addressing social and political problems...

...The more you think about "anti-leftism" and "anti-Americanism" together, the more they seem to share an untoward one-sidedness...

...Or decent working conditions and decent pensions...

...American conservatives have sought for decades to stigmatize everything "liberal" or "left," and have had considerable public success in doing so...

...Many New Leftists later concluded that Howe and Harrington were indeed right to call for a complete divorce of the left from all forms of authoritarianism, but the Dissenters later rued their own ferocity in the debate, regretting that they had perhaps slipped back into the sectarian style that they had long rejected...

...indeed, on the prospects of small magazines that value extended arguments by intellectuals about what is good and what is bad, what is happening and what ought to happen...

...Some readers may find it odd that Dissent still calls itself a journal of "left" ideas and "left" opinion...

...If you expect a post-intellectual, post-problem world, you needn't care much about democracy, and you probably won't read Dissent...

...Members of the early SDS were children of the 1950s, and McCarthy's witch-hunt was their formative experience, disposing them strongly against anticommunism...

...His book proclaiming The End of History was a flight manual for intellectuals who wanted to go on automatic pilot after the ideological wars of the twentieth century...

...Hobhouse once queried...

...But this was a bad way to enter a new era...

...In an early Dissent article entitled "Images of Socialism," Coser and Howe insisted on the legitimacy of utopian imagination...

...Anti-leftism and antiAmericanism, much like left-wing ideological blinders and conservative nationalist swagger, also represent the longing for an "era BC—Before Complexity...

...Its founders came out of the left, and they considered the mood back then to be both smug and wanting...

...Don't leave off the canvas the foes of such ideas, like American conservatives who reviled Social Security and Medicare as slides down the slippery slope from "individualism" to totalitarianism...

...I wish they were...

...Dissent will try to keep doing so in its sixth decade...

...Failed radical experiments showed how mistaken it was to try to reach nowhere, that is, to try to impose a "perfect," conflict-free society...

...Once they understood better the communications revolution of the last decade, they would probably want to discuss its democratic potentials and the threats it might pose to individual liberties or private life...

...It is even less popular than "liberal," and it wasn't fashionable when Dissent first appeared...

...It didn't exist...

...The Dissenters were children of the 1930s, and the murderous fraudulence of the Moscow Trials was for them a forDISSENT / Winter 2004 n 7 DECADES OF DISSENT mative experience...

...Others among them identify as "liberal socialists" or "social democrats" or "social liberals" or "liberal left" or some combination of these words—or they may be averse to any label...

...The Dissenters had in fact been forcefully antiMcCarthy, and the early SDS advocated participatory democracy, not communism...

...The "Dissent left"—I hesitate to use this unifying phrase, and it should not indicate too much unity—was born under the shadow of the Two Josephs (Stalin and McCarthy...

...Some aspects don't fit so comfortably with others...

...Out of its cramped space, and run editorially now through the less definable space of email, Dissent keeps dissenting and appearing in print every three months...

...Ikeism," wrote editor Irving Howe in Dissent's third issue, referring to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nickname, was really the longing for an "era BC—Before Complexity," a time when all questions were simple and answers easy...

...Depict the advocates of social citizenship...

...The same hope and belief animate its editors and writers today...

...They would be heartened, I think, by Dissent's resilience (most little magazines have short life 8 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 spans...

...Still, I think our more complex picture reveals how most of the left's history comprises struggles for democracy and hopes that social imagination might undo social inequities...

...Or decent health care...

...Dissent for years had a Fifth Avenue address, but it was only a mail-drop...

...It dissented against both of them, and has been animated by a democratic sensibility...

...Let's include some of the missing left and some of the missing right in order to get a somewhat larger sense of modern politics...

...Her dining room was Dissent's "office" until her death in 1999, after which the magazine rented a studio...

...Now include in our picture the leftists and trade unionists who argued that democracy ought to be economic as well as political, and who pointed out that considerable discrepancies of wealth translate into imbalances of political power and political voice, subverting the promise of common citizenship...

...At first they'd be a little puzzled to hear today's editors discussing what to circulate on the Web...

...Still, consider how everything becomes more complex when we think about who is missing from the canvas, and what is not there...

...Dissent's initiators, which included sociologist Lewis Coser, a refugee from Hitler's Europe, and Meyer Schapiro, the eminent art critic, didn't imagine that their journal would change the world...

...A number of former activists in the New Left began contributing to Dissent's pages then and were soon welcomed onto its editorial board...

...At the same time, they proposed, an image of a better, fairer, world could and ought to play the role of a "regulative idea...

...They believed in the value of disagreement, especially in a society that celebrated consensus...

...Utopia warranted two genuine cheers, Howe wrote in his last essay for the journal before his death, but not three...

...They might also wonder about the impact of Internet brevity and speed on intellectual life, on reflective reading and thinking habits and public debate...

...If members of the Weather Underground actually set their sights on the Dissent office, there was a reason why they failed to find it...

...They would be saddened by the steady weakness of the American left as well as the unions...

...But, finally, they also rebelled against the stiff mindset of their own "party," decided to leave Bolshevik furies behind, and sought a politics rooted in American democratic radicalism and in an American idiom...

...The word "left" is hardly in vogue these days...

...Wending through articles from the past fifty years, you will encounter arguments about the nature of capitalism, socialism, and democracy and on the impact of the cold war, McCarthyism, and mass culture...

...They intermingled with the world of "New York Intellectuals" and read their little magazines, such as Partisan Review and Politics...

...Political ideas are argued in order to address human dilemmas and not to defend a theory's honor...

...The magazine's founders usually called themselves "democratic socialists," and some current contributors still do...

...that is, people committed to the idea that all of us, as members of a common polity, ought to enjoy a range of basic social goods, such as a decent education, for example...

...as British philosopher L.T...

...Recall the applause for Francis Fukuyama's claim that all major intellectual issues were resolved by the victory of liberal democracy over communism...

...After all, the world is complex...

...Unlike art, nothing is ever "whole" in politics (except a totalitarian quest...

...Their education and experience in a small organization inspired by Leon Trotsky, Stalin's rival (and victim), immunized them against communist parties and totalitarian rationalizations...

...They also concluded that efforts to stuff the world into an all-encompassing design (derived from an all-knowing theory) result in disaster...

...The magazine always published with modest resources and no institutional base, counting instead on the commitments of editors, writers, an underpaid, part-time staff, and a few friends...

...Their effort has been made easier by the historical fact that the United States—in contrast to much of Western Europe—never had a mass socialist party that distinguished itself sharply from both undemocratic communists and anti-egalitarian conservatives...

...Yet the world always seems to get simpler for many conservatives...

...As if Osama bin Laden was protesting the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves...

...I sometimes wonder what sort of exchange might occur if members of Dissent's original circle were transported by some H.G...

...Other people told me subsequently that this story was fiction...

...Communism was one source of this bitter quarrel, which took place in both face-to-face arguments and in print...

...That didn't mean casting away all forms of social vision...

...Yes, part of the story is unhappy...

...Without it, how can anyone be an effective, democratic citizen...

...Not that those Stalinists, those failed economies, those swaggering, often whiskered tyrants, and those too-clever theorists are imaginary...

...This essay will introduce 50 Years of Dissent, a fiftieth anniversary anthology to be published later this year by Yale University Press...

...Perhaps some strokes might be thicker or the paint thinner in this or that place...

...When you say the word "left," American conservatives conjure up images of mass-murdering Stalinists with totalitarian aspirations, of imploding nationalized economies, of strutting third world dictators shouting "liberation" while shooting their critics, and of hectoring, self-important postmodern academics who can justify almost anything on behalf of Otherness...

...First Stanley, and after his death, Simone, managed Dissent's finances...

...Opponents of the civil rights movement used some like-minded notions not long ago in the United States, as do contemporary foes of feminism...

...Better to make the picture more complicated, both for your intellectual foes and for yourself...

...Should sick people be treated according to their illnesses or according to their status in labor markets...

...You will find appraisals of liberal and conservative politics along with anger at the malevolence of American racism and dismay over the disaster of Vietnam...

...The word utopia, they recalled, means literally "nowhere...

...Simone herself was a veteran of a very different underground, the French Resistance during World War II...

...Instead, you will find, broadly speaking, an underlying ethos that is humanist, inclusive and "equalityfriendly...

...It was true, however, that the Dissent circle and the early SDS, who might have been inter-generational allies, clashed politically and temperamentally in the 1960s...

...Howe, who was Dissent's moving spirit from the magazine's founding until his death in 1993, once said that he wanted the "socialization of concern" rather than the nationalization of the means of production...

...You will come upon descriptions of political movements and political moments, together with reflections on culture and counter-cultures, feminism, pluralism, and the meaning(s) of social inequality...

...Michael Harrington, America's leading socialist from the 1960s through the 1980s and a long-time member of the Dissent editorial board, argued for "the left-wing of the possible...

...In order to bomb the Dissent office, the Weather Underground would have had to target the Upper West Side apartment of Simone and Stanley Plastrik...

...Somewhere, maybe in a corner of our widening canvas, we can sketch a twenty-year-old American in uniform...

...But this picture is airbrushed (perhaps today we should say, "digitally remastered...

...APROMINENT ACADEMIC told me a few years ago that he had been in the Weather Underground, the violent breakaway faction of Students for a Democratic Society, and that his comrades planned around 1970 to bomb the Dissent office, "but we couldn't find it...

...Then sketch in DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 5 DECADES OF DISSENT Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative British prime minister who made "peace in our time" with Adolf Hitler...

...By now our picture is multidimensional and multifaceted...

...Millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic identified with "the left" in the hope that the powerless, the voiceless, and the poor might one day have some control over their own days, that they would be able to speak up and to live decently...

...The composite is not appealing...

...Today's editors would tell them what Dissent's readers have known for the last decade: if it was difficult to be on the left while communism continued, it also hasn't been so easy to redefine the left in communism's wake...

...Then draw in some of the people who today question the role of unmerited advantages in our society derived from social class, race, or gender...

...These are people who think that it is not true that "those who have, deserve" or that social suffering (like hunger) is always the fault of those in distress...

...In its post-9/11 guise, it tries to show that somehow, "in the final analysis," all of American history, and not fundamentalist terrorists, was responsible for that awful day...

...They moved closer to the old American Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas...

...Michael Walzer, political philosopher and coeditor of Dissent since 1975, has long been an eloquent proponent of pluralism in American society and within left-wing thinking...

...justifications of social inequalDECADES OF DISSENT ity are treated with skepticism, with a presumption that the burden of moral proof ought to rest on an apologist for this or that inequality...

...Add in social democratic and labor movements, which championed universal suffrage and basic democratic rights in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, while conservatives insisted that political equality violated the "natural order of things"—an order in which everyone, naturally, belonged in a proper place...

...Start with all the missing socialists, including Marxists, who were communism's first foes, and often its first victims...

...Communism's fall came along with globalization's rise and great transformations in the international economy...

...And they don't have a mystical belief in the all-curing powers of The Market reminiscent of the old communist faith in The State...

...This soldier wonders aloud, "Why can my life be risked abroad on behalf of patriotism, while prosperous patriots at home holler against paying a fair share of 6 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 taxes for the public's general welfare...

...Many of the old coordinates dissolved in the 1990s, and then some more disappeared after September 11...

...But they did hope to make intellectual life just a bit more complicated for both the right and the left in an era A.D.—after Dissent's birth—by provoking debates about political ideas and about American and global issues...

...The famous "generation gap" of the 1960s also played a role...

...Dissenters cheered the end of communism, but they also mistrusted all-encompassing explanations, partly because someone or something important always seems to be missing from them...

...Yet just as the left has had wretched moments, so America's past cannot be airbrushed of some grim matters, such as slavery or the fate of Native Americans or discrimination against women or exploitation of working people...

...But consider, isn't the left's history a bit like America's...

...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent...

...Still, the point was to pull beyond "the provincialism of the immediate" and to grasp "the democratic utopianism that runs like a bright thread through American intellectual life—call it Emersonianism, call it republicanism, call it whatever you like...

...yOU WON'T FIND one "Dissent" answer to all questions in our pages, or the aspiration to formulate one...

...Fifty years cover a lot of politics, a lot of contention, a lot of ideas...

...And yes, part of the left—call it "the left-that-doesn't-learn"—has always thought that if the world doesn't fit its dogmas, the world is disproved...

...The same suspicions made many Dissenters leery of "postmodern" theories in the 1980s and 1990s...

...Wellsian means from a 1954 editorial discussion to a meeting taking place a half a century later...

...Some of Dissent's founders—Howe, Emmanuel Geltman, Stanley Plastrik—were once activists in a "Trotskyist" variant of the Old Left, just before and after the Second World War...

...Some historians remember them, but who else...

...The American Revolution promised equality and freedom, and since 1776, millions of people were liberated in a wide variety of ways by coming to these shores...

...They would probably be dismayed to find that they left one America longing for an "era BC," only to arrive in another...

...When intellectuals cannot do anything else," Howe would quip, "they start a magazine...

...They suspected that sectarianism in language and sectarianism in thought make up a joint venture...