Every issue has one section dedicated to a particular question. Collecting responses from a range of perspectives, these symposia prompt us to think about the values and ideas that shape our most urgent cultural and personal decisions.
“The demise of socialism as an emancipatory vision poses a problem for the left. It is not that it lacks good ideas for social changes and public policies that would improve life for most people, but that these proposals have not been coherently organized in a way that makes for a compelling ideal...”
Anti-Politics
The news in 2011 was dominated by some of the most archetypal instances of oppositional politics that human society can produce, in the Arab Spring…
Freeing the Market
There is a difference between “neoliberal markets” and “free markets”; if the Left wants to offer plausible economic solutions today, it needs to reconnect with…
Toward a Social Socialism
We can show that another world is possible by building it in the spaces available, and then pushing against the state to expand those spaces.…
Libya and the Left
Ten years ago, surveying the post-9/11 landscape in the pages of Dissent, Michael Walzer famously asked if there could be a “decent Left” in a…
American Dreamers
The New Left’s insistence on personal authenticity, which drove its passion for freedom and its abhorrence of authority, reduced politics, and especially leftist politics, to…
