Grim, But Hopeful

The world is a grim place these days, but here at home, in the months since November, our spirits have lifted a bit, and in this issue of Dissent we are able to publish a few hopeful articles. It’s not that we have stopped worrying, but we worry now with a new sense of purpose. Studying the 2006 voting statistics, Ruy Teixeira manages to look forward to 2008. (Benjamin Ross expresses some skepticism, which our readers will expect.) And Nelson Lichtenstein and Jim McNeill, analyzing the state of the unions, can write about (what we call on the front cover) “labor’s agenda”—as if there might really be an agenda and not just a wish list. How all this will play out over the next eighteen months is uncertain, but things are possible now that we hardly dreamed of two years ago. In the next Dissent, we will carry our first article in years on national health insurance.

We feature here a symposium on democratization and the lessons of Iraq. The contributions are very strong, the argument heated. The lesson that I would stress is more a matter of reiteration than discovery. Again and again we learn what we already know: that war, contra Clausewitz, is not best understood as politics by other means—because the “other means” make a radical difference. War is sometimes necessary and sometimes, when would-be conquerors are defeated or massacres stopped, it is beneficial. But its benefits are largely negative. Positive benefits, such as the establish...