Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
WE Focus THIS quarter on three issues central to the upcoming election, though they haven't been getting the attention they deserve. The first is the foreign policy of the United States over the...
...n The third issue is the politics of the family...
...The first is the foreign policy of the United States over the next four years—not just, what should be done in Iraq...
...We and they are committed to freedom everywhere...
...The debate about the family has gotten extraordinarily tangled on the left, and so we have asked Cynthia Epstein and Arlene Skolnick to edit a series of articles, beginning in this issue and continuing in the Winter and Spring of 2005, about family, work, and politics—the really hard questions of everyday life...
...There are people on the left with a long record of defending their own civil liberties and noone else's...
...n It is a special pleasure to include in this issue a long essay by Jack Greenberg, who directed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's campaigns for many years, looking back on the struggle for civil rights in the American South and comparing it with the struggle for Roma rights in Eastern Europe today...
...n The second issue is the Constitution and the protection it accords to individual freedom and political opposition...
...Our writers disagree about how far the Bush administration has gone, but they are generally worried, with good reason, about the state of our freedom...
...Mitchell Cohen, Stanley Hoffmann, and AnneMarie Slaughter argue in different ways for a more robust version of the internationalist doctrine...
...Family values" is a right-wing "wedge" issue, but it shouldn't be, for the true defenders of family values are the people who also defend a decent welfare system, strengthened public schools, federally funded day care, the right to organize and strike for a living wage—yes, and gay marriage too, the demand for which is the strongest possible endorsement of the value of family life...
...But freedom and security sometimes have to be balanced, and in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the critical question is how to strike that balance...
...At least, that is our question...
...The comparison is wonderfully illuminating in both directions...
...I don't think it is the question George W. Bush and his associates have actually addressed...
...But that is not our record, nor is it the record of the people we have invited to write for us here...
...which may be an unanswerable question) but also, how should we relate to the rest of the world...
...Liberal/left politics requires a new internationalism, and Suzanne Nossel ably describes what that might mean for a Kerry administration...
...MW...
...They have asked how they can exploit the fear of terrorism to advance an authoritarian agenda that was in place before 9/11...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
