From Democratiya to Dissent
Johnson, Alan
From Democratiya to Dissent ALAN JOHNSON The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005. Sixteen issues, one book, and a quartermillion readers later, Democratiya is being...
...We democrats will fare better if we are guided by a positive animating ethic and seek modes of realization through serious discussion and practical reform efforts...
...Alan Johnson was the founder and editor of Democratiya...
...Not exactly a crowded political space, but one that Dissent had long occupied with distinction...
...Sixteen issues, one book, and a quartermillion readers later, Democratiya is being incorporated into Dissent...
...Why...
...From Democratiya to Dissent ALAN JOHNSON The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005...
...Our founding statement declared flatly, “Anyone seeking a model should look at Dissent...
...and, of course, the bleak political climate that descended on every intelligent anticommunist and democratic socialist in the late 1940s...
...Those precious ideas were rendered the inheritance of all by the social democratic, feminist and egalitarian revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
...Democratiya will stand for the human rights of victims of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity...
...In the oldest continuously operating bar in Manhattan, we discussed this infant journal...
...But [you] can never be self-supporting, [so] it’s stick in one hand, cup in the other, and off you go...
...The sixteen issues of Democratiya are now permanently archived at the Dissent Web site...
...We had tried to answer in the affirmative by exploring what it might mean to renew what Paul Berman calls the “third force” tradition of Léon Blum, George Orwell, and Irving Howe...
...He had tried to remain “devoted to some large principle or value, modulated by experience and thought, but firm in purpose...
...Grossly simplifying tendencies of thought, not least the disastrous belief that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” are once again leading to the abandonment of democrats, workers, women and gays who get on the wrong side of “anti-imperialists” (who are considered “progressive” simply because they’re anti-American...
...In particular, we strove to showcase the best of the contradictory “Shachtmanite” legacy, from the clear-sighted internationalism of Susan Green to the civil rights activism of Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz to Max Shachtman’s own fierce defense of democracy, captured in his 1958 speech to mark the merger of the Independent Socialist League and the Socialist Party, when he announced that democracy was his “guiding star” (see Democratiya 6...
...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...
...Democratiya had taken as its central intellectual problem the anguished question posed by Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer: “Can there be a decent Left...
...In launching Democratiya I had taken Howe’s creation of Dissent as a model...
...Two commitments give shape to the Democratiya project,” he wrote...
...Those four adjectives should routinely characterize left politics, but we all know that they don’t...
...Together we will take up the steady work of democratic radicalism...
...FROM THE FOUNDING STATEMENT OF DEMOCRATIYA, 2005 Democratiya believes that in a radically changed world parts of the Left have backed themselves into an incoherent and negativist “anti-imperialist” corner, losing touch with longheld democratic, egalitarian and humane values...
...As the late Dissent editor Irving Howe put it, “You have to smile when you want to sulk...
...This argumentative style . . . is also a moral style...
...Not to mention the demands of fundraising for little magazines...
...That’s what the Euston Manifesto of 2006, signed by many editors of the two journals, had been all about, for me at least...
...The attraction to the “one-man operation” was overwhelming...
...Of course, no journal is ever really a “one-man” or “one-woman” business...
...his growing sense of ignorance...
...Hell, Dwight Macdonald had Irving Howe as an assistant...
...Well, when Dwight Macdonald closed Politics, his “one-man magazine,” in 1949, he cited the relentless demands of producing a little magazine: the lack of time it gave him for reflection...
...Convinced that today’s Left lacks enough good ideas to sustain us, the journal had always been concerned to bring a wider variety of experiences and traditions into fruitful conversation...
...foreign policy as it has developed since 9/11, has been reduced to another “Great Contest”: “The Resistance” (or “Multitude”) against “Imperialism” (or “Empire...
...In joining Dissent, Democratiya will leave part of its wider project behind...
...Actually, I had taken Howe as a model...
...No one...
...The second commitment is to defend and promote a form of political argument that is nuanced, probing, and concrete, principled but open to disagreement: no slogans, no jargon, no unexamined assumptions, no party line...
...We are partisans and artisans of this fighting faith and we pit it against what Paul Berman has called “the paranoid and apocalyptic nature of the totalitarian mindset...
...In June 2008, with these gloomy thoughts in mind, I sat down in McSorley’s on East 7th Street, with Dissent board member Paul Berman...
...I knew what I wanted to emulate...
...I had many people to lean on, not least Jane Ashworth, Anthony Julius, Eve Garrard, and Brian Brivati...
...liberté, égalité, fraternit...
...No one left behind...
...The first is to defend and promote a left politics that is liberal, democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist...
...the rights of man...
...Later, Michael Walzer wrote a preface to Global Politics Since 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews (Foreign Policy Centre, 2007...
...The political center of gravity of Democratiya was to be pro-democracy and antitotalitarian in foreign policy and social democratic in domestic policy...
...So, when Paul Berman welcomed Democratiya as “the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes in the English-speaking world,” we didn’t quite believe him, but there was joy unconfined nonetheless...
...There was a mutual regard between the two journals from the start...
...And we hit on an idea: could Democratiya join forces with Dissent...
...This world-view has ushered back in some of the worst habits of mind that dominated parts of the left in the Stalinist period: manicheanism, reductionism, apologia, denial, cynicism...
...Against anti-modernism, irrationalism, fear of freedom, loathing of the woman, and the cult of master-slave human relations we stand for the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...
...By my lights he showed how one could move from the revolutionary Marxist Left to the social democratic Left to good purpose, and without “cancelling one’s experience,” as he put it...
...We will be everywhere pro-democracy, pro-labour rights, pro-women’s rights, pro-gay rights, proliberty, pro-reason and pro-social justice...
...We urge those writers, subscribers, and readers—who numbered more than a quarter of a million from more than forty countries—who feel a kinship with Dissent to read, contribute, subscribe, and donate...
...It wasn’t just that we shared such writers as Norman Geras, Shalom Lappin, Andrei Markovits, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Todd Gitlin...
...Democracy, “even for the poorest he...
...Discussions continued with the Dissent editors and were concluded in the summer of 2009...
...The Democratiya archives are at www.dissentmagazine.org...
...I look forward to contributing to the Dissent editorial board and, with the help of the Democratiya network, increasing the presence of Dissent in the United Kingdom and Europe...
...In some quarters, the complexity of the post–cold-war world, and of U.S...
...I had decided to try to follow him in that...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
