So Long, 2017

So Long, 2017

Dissent’s best from a year of outrage.

Say what you will about the outrages that transpired in the United States and around the world in 2017. But seldom has it been more crucial to encourage dissent from the deeds of the powerful and to understand what kinds of dissent might lead to real change. In other words, we have been working hard all year to live up to the name of our magazine.

A future historian who reads through our most popular articles from 2017 will get a keen appreciation of how thoughtful leftists made sense of the rule of Trump and his ilk—and sought to blaze a path toward a more decent future. Nancy Fraser and Gabriel Winant examined the role that centrist Democrats played in the triumph of the Trumpian right. Alyssa Battistoni took on the chimera of a “post-ideological” universal basic income. Jawziya Zaman exposed the contradictions of navigating the American immigration system, amid the Trump administration’s brutal crackdown, and Joanne Barkan dissected the administration’s agenda to privatize public education.

Julia Ott drew on U.S. history to show how tax legislation keeps making the rich even richer. Mitchell Cohen, our erstwhile co-editor, made clear, in reflecting on the centenary of Bolshevik Revolution, that a new order sustained by the terror of a one-party state betrays the glorious hope that socialism will advance democracy, not crush it. Another former co-editor, Michael Walzer, asked, in a self-consciously archaic title, what is “The Historical Task of the Left in the Present Period”? It remains the enduring task of Dissent to keep answering that question, as long the orange-haired demon tweets from the White House and long after he’s gone. —Michael Kazin, Editor

1. Nancy Fraser, The End of Progressive Neoliberalism (January 2)
2. Gabriel Winant, The New Working Class (June 27)
3. Alyssa Battistoni, The False Promise of Universal Basic Income (Spring 2017)
4. Zelda Bronstein, When Affordable Housing Meets Free-Market Fantasy (November 27)
5. Michael Walzer, The Historical Task of the Left in the Present Period (January 2)
6. Sam Moyn, Beyond Liberal Internationalism (Winter 2017)
7. Jawziya F. Zaman, Why I Left Immigration Law (July 12)
8. Colin Gordon, What’s the Matter with Iowa? (March 21)
9. Cole Stangler, The Trouble With Macron (April 17)
10. Julia Ott, How Tax Policy Created the 1% (April 18)
11. Johanna Brenner, There Was No Such Thing as “Progressive Neoliberalism” (January 14)
12. Joanne Barkan, Milton Friedman, Betsy DeVos, and the Privatization of Public Education (January 17)
13. Maurice Isserman, Give Peace a Chance (Fall 2017)
14. Nancy Fraser, Against Progressive Neoliberalism, A New Progressive Populism (January 28)
15. Mitchell Cohen, What Lenin’s Critics Got Right (Fall 2017)
16. Nelson Lichtenstein, How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump (April 25)
17. Annie Hylton, Dirty Laundry: An Investigation (Summer 2017)
18. Michael Kazin, Democrats Need More Than the Working Class (June 27)
19. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, Martin Luther King’s Radical Legacy, From the Poor People’s Campaign to Black Lives Matter (January 15)
20. James Chappel, Modern Family (Summer 2017)

Subscribe by December 31 to get your 2018 fill of Dissent—20 percent off—starting with our Winter issue on the Crisis of Democracy.