My Favorite Mistake

My Favorite Mistake

It’s easy to come up with plans for remaking society. It’s much harder to work alongside ordinary people to build coalitions that can change the rules of the game.

My first issue as co-editor of Dissent was published in the summer of 2018, which at the time felt like the beginning of something. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just knocked off Nancy Pelosi’s heir apparent, Bernie Sanders was putting together his next presidential campaign, and DSA memberships were zooming upward. It seemed, too, like arguments that divided earlier generations of leftists were melting away. Electorally minded reformers were embracing positions that once seemed radical, and radicals were getting ready to knock doors for Bernie. This was our version of the popular front, and it was so damn exciting to be part of it.

Dissent wasn’t at the forefront of this shift, but more than sixty years of advocating democratic socialism counted for something—a not unimportant piece of left-wing history that we could draw on to make a better future. I don’t think little magazines shape the course of history, but I love them anyway, along with the work that goes into making them: pitching ideas, finding the perfect writer for a piece, dragging those perfect writers through more rounds of edits than they would like, and contributing your own stuff from time to time. There’s no strict relationship between style and substance, but I’ve always felt that a particular kind of thinking, and therefore a particular kind of politics, fits especially well with this approach. It’s principled without being partisan, engaged with the world but not a prisoner of the moment.

In the way of fresh editors, I came into the job with a lengthy to-do list. I’ve taken care of a decent portion of it over the years, but one idea I never managed to pull off was a recurring section I wanted to call “My Favorite Mistake.” The hope was to provide a space where writers could own up to being wrong and talk about what they learned from the experience. That should be the point of thinking in public—not proving how right you’ve always been, but showing how to learn from a world that’s more complicated than any of us can fully grasp. And maybe I had a sneakier motive too: an unacknowledged assumption that old-timers would welcome a chance to get right with the kids of today, the ones who understood that yesterday’s rules no longer applied.

Which, I now think, was a mistake of my own. Looking back on the summer of 2018, it’s clear that the democratic socialist moment was closer to its end than its beginning. There were major structural factors behind the boomlet, including brutal levels of economic inequality, the increasing difficulty of affording the basics of a middle-class life, the rise of millennials and zoomers, and the breakdown of legacy media institutions. But there was more contingency to the story than I realized at the time—Bernie’s unique appeal to disaffected voters in 2016, AOC’s preternatural skills on camera, the fever dream of the Trump presidency making it seem as if anything was possible, and the usual scramble for reporters searching for the next big thing.

Instead of cheering as the left moved from success to success, I’ve spent most of the last six years watching our new popular front crumble while the divisions I thought were on the way out—lower-case-d democrats on one side, radicals on the other—roared back to life.

The funny thing is that while the currents were moving against the broader left, I started appreciating Dissent even more. Really, what I mean is that I decided Michael Harrington was right about a lot more than I realized. Not everything, of course, but on the big picture stuff he was dead on. It’s easy to come up with plans for remaking society. It’s so much harder to work alongside ordinary people to build coalitions that can change the rules of a game rigged in favor of the powerful. It’s also so much more important—and, I think, beautiful.

But there’s another insight of Harrington’s that has been on my mind lately. It comes from one of his last books, The Long-Distance Runner, published the year before he died. He had seen plenty of friends pass through life’s milestones, and he had noticed a pattern. There would be celebrations for the marriage, or the birth of a child, or the start of a new job, but they were tinged with sadness. Each step into boring adulthood was a step away from a life consumed by politics. That’s not a bad thing—Harrington was a father of two with a home in Westchester—but it’s a change, and it would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

That’s why this is going to be my last issue as co-editor of Dissent. Not because the work is any less fulfilling, or the cause any less significant, but because my own passage into boring adulthood is taking me out of this part of the game for a while. I’ll still be looking for the left wing of the possible, though. Only now do I appreciate how much it’s worth finding.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

Timothy Shenk is the outgoing co-editor of Dissent.