Response by Michael Walzer

Jim Rule has provided a textbook example of what I called in the last issue of Dissent “the great crossover” (“All God’s Children Got Values,” Spring 2005). The political projects that he rejects—”schemes involving vast short-term suffering on behalf of speculative goals of sweeping historical transformation”—are of course classic left-wing schemes. We once called ourselves revolutionaries, didn’t we? Now the revolutionaries seem to be on the other side. And the projects he supports—”moderate steps toward incremental improvement” taken with great humility about what we are able to know and do—are positively Burkean, classically conservative. I am not criticizing the crossover, just describing it; there are good reasons for it. But Rule’s version of the crossover seems to me incomplete in one respect and much too extreme in another.

It is incomplete because of the Old Left certainty with which he condemns Dissent for publishing articles by his opponents. Note, please, that we have printed three of Jim’s pieces against the war; that in our Spring 2003 symposium on the war, six of the eight writers opposed the invasion of Iraq; and that in the two years since the war, we have given about three times as much space to critics of the war as to defenders. Jim wants to give no space at all to those revolutionaries who sought historical transformations in the Middle East—at ...