Symposium

The question is malposed. Unless and until things change dramatically for the better, here and abroad, there will be bright dreams and hopes for a different order. Dissent‘s particular contributions to those dreams come in many ways, not least out of its alertness to the appalling economic injustices that most American intellectuals now seem to take as inevitable. Yet politics in this country is a piecemeal and pragmatic business, rooted in democratic values we respect and wish to enlarge upon. Now that communism is dead, it seems like the ultimate folly to revive the old project of political utopianism, our utopianism, while casting aspersions (as the question quietly does) on less transcendent pursuits. Leading a political double life, between bright dreams and piecemeal reforms, is risky. It easily gets labeled half-hearted and hypocritical—and may actually become half-hearted and hypocritical. But in view of where the left has been and is now, ...