Carter, Obama, and the Left-Center Divide
WHEN SENATOR Ted Kennedy walked onto the podium at the 1980 Democratic Convention, the crowd erupted. The senator raised his fist to the Massachusetts delegation. Then he quickly shook President Carter’s hand and walked away without lifting Carter’s arm—the traditional sign of unity at the end of a primary battle. After Kennedy left, the crowd shouted, “We want Ted!” so vigorously that he returned for an encore. At that point, it looked like Carter had to chase Kennedy down to get his attention. Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee, took close notice of what had happened. “If that’s the be... More
Arguments: Response to Andrew F. March
MY SKEPTICAL eye alights upon Andrew F. March’s fourth paragraph, where he explains that, in The Flight of the Intellectuals, I spend 100 pages recounting “the often stomach-churning history of Arab and Islamic attitudes towards Israel, Jews, Hitler, and the Holocaust.” He suggests that I have slandered Ramadan by family association with the stomach-churning history. But March devotes not one sentence to describing or summarizing what is said in those hundred pages.
Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood ... More
Arguments: The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan
PAUL BERMAN has written an odd book. It is not intellectual history–he rightly does not claim for himself any expertise in Islamic legal, theological and political thought, and he makes no effort to fully explicate Ramadan’s own doctrines in light of those traditions. It is not political biography–he is not telling Ramadan’s personal story except in select snippets. It is not quite political argument–he is not giving an analysis of the social and cultural situation of Muslims in the West and telling us What is to Be Done. It is not even a plea for vigilance–he insists in numerous places tha... More
Arguments: Andrew F. March and Paul Berman on The Flight of the Intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan
THIS APRIL saw the publication of Dissent editorial board member Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, a “searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment” examining “how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their effort to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.“ In the book, Berman criticizes, among others, Tariq Ramadan, chair of Islamic Studies at Oxford, and his intellectual supporters.
In the following debate, Yale ass... More
A Liberal Endures
True Compass: A Memoir
by Edward M. Kennedy.
Little Brown, 532 pp.
THE UNITED States Senate is the most potent legislative body in the Western world. It is also one of the least democratic. Under the Constitution, it has the exclusive power to ratify treaties, to consent to or reject cabinet and federal court appointments, and to throw a president out of office for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet the vote of a senator from Wyoming—whose population of 540,000 is smaller than that of... More
Why Are Jews Liberal? (An Alternative to Norman Podhoretz)
JEWS STAND to the left on the American political spectrum. In my lifetime, the range of the Jewish vote for Democratic presidential candidates has run from around 65 to 85 percent; liberal/left third party candidates—Henry Wallace, John Anderson, Ralph Nader—also get disproportionate numbers of Jewish votes; financial contributions are even more lopsided. Every left movement from union organizing in the 1930s to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties to the anti-apartheid campaign of the eighties to MoveOn in 2004 and 2008 has been disproportionately Jewish. And ... More
From Liberalism to Social Democracy
Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson
Cambridge University Press, 2008, 191 pp.
WHEN POLITICAL thinkers adapt old ideas to new circumstances, they sometimes find that they have left the old ideas behind. Liberal Beginnings, a work of historical argument by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, is about how this happens—or at least how it has happened in the past. More narrowly, it is about the way modern liberalism emerged from early ... More
Should We Stay in Afghanistan?
AFTER SEVEN and a half years, U.S. and coalition forces have made little headway in Afghanistan. The Taliban have resurged and the country has become a center for opium and heroin production. Michael Walzer, Fred Smoler, and Susie Linfield debate our presence in Afghanistan in a March 7 panel.
Transforming the Electorate
PROGRESSIVES HAD high ambitions and expectations at the commencement of the Obama presidency: the economic debacle needs to be overcome, but the new president also needs to realize long-delayed goals. He must work toward lessening poverty and inequality, dramatically improving U.S. employment, health care, and education, and noticeably reducing environmental damage.
President Obama lacks a clear mandate to pursue many of these goals. A sixty-vote, filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate would not have assured passage of many of these proposals. Remember that the majority ... More
The Left Today: A Social Democratic View
An Interview with Mitchell Cohen
OVER THE last several decades, a deep crisis has developed on the left, and the effort to rethink its politics and ideas has sparked perennial debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Phase 2’s Robert Zwarg interviewed Dissent’s co-editor Mitchell Cohen early this summer in Leipzig after Cohen spoke at the university on the panel, “1968 in America.“
Robert Zwarg: The war in Iraq dominated Democratic and Republican campaigns this past year and Americans seem split over it. At the same time it seems to block out other important questions. G... More
Debating Democracy Promotion in China
SHOULD FOREIGN politicians and critics participate in the promotion of democracy in countries like China and Burma? Or should liberalization and pro-democratic change come from within? Daniel A. Bell and Michael Walzer debate the role the international community should play in China.
Daniel A. Bell - Michael Walzer - Daniel A. Bell’s Response
Two Visions of Democracy
Last winter, Sign and Sight asked Pascal Bruckner, Ian Buruma, and Timothy Garton Ash: “Who should the West support: moderate Islamists like Tariq Ramadan, or Islamic dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali?” The question sparked fierce debate across Europe. Dissent’s Paul Berman entered the argument with his April New Republic article, More
Two Visions of Democracy: Nadia Urbinati
On few topics such as the one that concerns us here—that is, the relationship between liberal principles and religious cultures—the debate over the identity of the Left (i.e., progressive democracy views broadly conceived) clearly overlaps with the issue of the identity of democracy.
It seems to me that, for now, two positions have emerged: on the one hand, there are those who, questioning what they regard as a naive liberal ideal of toleration, acknowledge the existence of cultural and religious differences within a democratic community, but with one exception—Islam. On the o... More
Two Visions of Democracy: Michael Walzer Responds
Nadia Urbinati is an old friend and I am definitely in favor of dialogue with her. So this is a response to—and critique of—her essay, and all my arguments here are open to further discussion. Both the oppositions that Nadia sets up, between the two kinds of multiculturalism and the two versions of democratic theory, are examples of the rigid (Manichean?) dichotomies that she claims to be against.
These oppositions don’t come close, it seems to me, to an accurate description of the arguments that are actua... More
Two Visions of Democracy: Letter 1
Dear Michael,
I cannot but strongly agree with you that we should not be eager to bring “all the people” into the conversation. A culture of dialogue is not and must not be indifferent to whom our interlocutors are – we cannot dialogue with those who want eliminate us and threaten our life and with those who support them. I am not eager to bring terrorists into conversation! How could I?
In my intention, the argument I am advancing should take us to the opposite direction. The point of my argument is precisely that not all Muslims are friendly to or supportive of terrorism, ... More
Two Visions of Democracy: Letter 2
Dear Nadia,
Many thanks for your generous reply. Of course, I know that you don’t intend to launch a dialogue with terrorists and their supporters, and you know that I don’t exclude Islam from my view of multiculturalism – nor do any of my friends: the fiercest opponents of jihadi radicalism recognize that there are anti-jihadi versions of Islam. There may be block thinking on the far right; I just don’t find it among Dissent leftists. So we are not so far apart. But perhaps we have a different view of the value of dialogue. Let me use for a moment another analogy... More
Two Visions of Democracy: Letter 4
Dear Nadia,
It appears that the Cold War analogy is centrally important in our discussion. You keep coming back to its Italian version, where Bobbio argued for a politics of dialogue rather than of confrontation. And I have conceded that that may well have been the right argument in Italy.
But its effectiveness, even in Italy, depended on the larger international confrontation. Without the Truman Doctrine in Greece, without the Korean War, without Radio Free Europe, without the strong support and wide publicity that American ‘Cold Warriors’ gave to the Eastern dissidents, w... More
Turin Controversy: Missing the Point
My friend Andrew Arato charges me with “pure evasion,” but he misses the point, indeed, several points. He grants Israel’s right to exist, which is good of him, but asks: “which territorial entity” should be recognized? That, however, is not the issue for Tariq Ramadan, Tariq Ali and (most) of the black-listers. Their issue is the existence of the Jewish state regardless of borders. My criticisms are of the “left that doesn’t learn” in explicit contrast to “the fair and opened minded left.” (See “Anti-Semitism and the ... More
