The Last Page

I am an immigrant to Dissent-land from the shores of the New Left. Although I’ve had my naturalization papers since 1986, my nontraditional background got me this Last Page assignment. For the magazine’s forty-fifth anniversary, the editors asked me to describe how Dissent looked when I first stepped off the boat. And how does it look now to someone of my extraction?

My extraction: After generic antiwar and student protests, I spent the 1970s looking, mostly in Italy, for the Third Way—an alternative to both Leninism and social democracy that would be revolutionary, democratic, and socialist. Then I discovered the New American Movement (NAM), whose members were reading Gramsci and digging in for a long war of p...