Dissent (magazine)

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Cover of the Fall 2005 issue of the Dissent magazine.

Dissent is a quarterly of politics, culture and social thought edited by Mitchell Cohen and Michael Walzer. It was founded in 1954 by a group of New York Intellectuals who included Irving Howe, Lewis A. Coser, and Meyer Schapiro. Howe and the other founders recognized the left's weakness during Eisenhower’s administration, and established the magazine as a means to espouse social democratic values, critique contemporary politics and culture, and oppose both Soviet totalitarianism and McCarthyism. It's contributing writers generally offer a diverse range of liberal, hawkish, progressive, neo-conservative and pro-Israel viewpoints.

From its inception, Dissent's politics deviated from the standard ideological positions of the left. Throughout the Cold War, its editors and contributors were rigorously anti-Communist, condemning the political and moral atrocities of the USSR and China and calling into question the Marxist contention that culture is at the service of ideology. Unlike Monthly Review and other radical publications, Dissent was critical of the Communist experiments in Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, and maintained that the left's mandate was to defend liberal and democratic values as well as socialist ones. Generally, this manifested in a pragmatic approach to politics.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dissent’s skepticism toward Third World revolutions and the culture of the New Left isolated it from the left’s student movements, but its commitment to liberal foreign policy and social causes — in particular, labor and civil rights issues — separated it from the growing neoconservative movement. After this tumultuous period, Dissent reconciled with several veterans of the New Left, who now write for the magazine.

Although Dissent still identifies itself with the liberal values of social democracy, its editors and contributors represent a wide variety of political outlooks. The hawkish liberalism of Paul Berman is printed alongside the exuberant Marxism of Marshall Berman. Recently, the magazine was divided over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Michael Walzer opposed the invasion while criticizing the rhetoric and analysis of the anti-war movement and Mitchell Cohen supported intervention while remaining critical of the Bush administration.