Editor’s Page

This issue marks the fiftieth anniversary of our magazine. We plan a number of events in the coming year to celebrate, even if the political environment is uncongenial to elation. It prompts dissent instead. Our main event remains the ideas and arguments in our pages. We write for our times, against them, imagining better ones-insisting on the values of political democracy and social equality, on liberty with solidarity. Our anniversary issue engages the present, but also provides a little perspective on Dissent‘s values and history.

If you want to know why Dissent is “left-wing,” look at what the most right-wing administration in recent memory calls its “compassionate conservatism”: taxes cut to the benefit of those who can most afford them; Medicare reformed and an energy bill designed to the advantage of corporations and Mr. Bush’s political fortunes; disregard of civil liberties; determined chipping at the wall separating religion and state.

Every criticism of this administration is not “Bush-bashing.” Yes, some attacks on Mr. Bush are puerile. They resemble nothing so much as conservative vilification of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The trouble with the Bush presidency is political not personal; policies, not syntax, are the problem. This president, who came into office after losing the popular vote, is a domestic unilateralist in war time. That should worry everyone, not least because his elect...