Few small magazines remain so for long. A handful get larger over time; most die at a fairly young age. One exception is Dissent, the independent left-wing quarterly that was founded in the dark days of the McCarthy era by the literary critic Irving Howe and the sociologist Lewis Coser, which will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary later this week. For decades, Dissent’s subscription list has hovered around the mid-four figures, never going much higher or lower; today, it has just over ten thousand followers on Twitter, its editors never pay themselves a penny, and its writers don’t make a whole lot more. Creatures that function at a consistently low metabolic rate are prone to being picked off by predators or to just stop moving. And yet, Dissent has survived its founding editors, eleven Presidencies, the rise and fall of neo-conservatism, Ramparts, The Public Interest, Talk, and George. The reasons for this longevity are more interesting than sheer persistence.
Howe and Coser belonged to the anti-Stalinist left, which by the early fifties placed them in one of the tiniest and most precarious minorities of all. They started Dissent to fight battles on all sides—against McCarthyism, against Communism, against the drift toward quiescence and conformity among other intellectuals. As to what the magazine was for, in the second issue, in the unpromising spring of 1954, the editors wrote, adapting Tolstoy, “Socialism is the name of our desire.” They started with just enough money to put out four issues.
There’s something absurdly, quixotically ambitious about launching a socialist magazine in America at any moment, but it’s hard to think of a less favorable time than sixty years ago, with Eisenhower in the White House, Joe McCarthy at the height of his demagogic power, and Stalin’s corpse barely cold. Yet Dissent outlasted predictions of its early demise and attracted writers and thinkers well beyond its tiny size—Norman Mailer (“The White Negro,” on the phenomenon of the hipster, created a minor sensation in 1957), the activist and writer Michael Harrington, the social critic Paul Goodman, the art historian Meyer Schapiro, the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Dissent’s socialism was never a doctrinaire program. It was closer to a spirit of criticism, a vision of a more just society, an openness to movements of democratic change, a refusal to accept the given on its own terms. Howe liked to use the word “utopia,” advisedly. He didn’t mean the paradise of dogmatists, but something much more modest and humane—a yearning for what is not but may be. “Whether a real option or a mere fantasy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “this utopia is as needed by mankind as bread and shelter.”
I began writing for Dissent in my twenties, when Howe accepted an essay I’d sent in cold, about the West African country where I served with the Peace Corps. “Letter from Togo” didn’t exactly fit with the magazine’s longstanding concerns, but I will never forget the thrill of reading Howe’s typewritten letter of acceptance, which informed me that the piece would have to be cut, and enclosed his phone number. He was an immensely accomplished, formidable, busy man—the model of a public intellectual in a way that, by the nineteen-eighties, hardly existed any longer—but he told me to call him collect. There was something of the magazine’s egalitarian spirit in this, and Howe became the closest thing to a mentor that I ever had, with most of the relationship taking place in my own mind, and outlasting his too-early death in 1993, at seventy-two.
I wrote for Dissent for the next fifteen years, and eventually joined the editorial board. Living in Boston at the time, I would take the train down to New York for quarterly meetings, where two generations of leftists—the Old and the New—sat around a large conference table at the New School and argued about democratic socialism, American and world politics, and the latest issue of the magazine, some of them mumbling, others ringingly clear, a conversation that appeared to have been going on since well before my birth. They all seemed to have known each other for decades, knew one another’s biases and weaknesses, could predict every political position and rhetorical move, and put up with one another in the way of a family whose common past and shared bonds outweighs every annoyance. I never felt younger than in my late thirties on those Manhattan Saturdays at Dissent editorial meetings. I wondered how long the magazine would last.
In the early aughts, at board meetings and holiday parties, I started noticing the presence of people even younger than me. There was a new generation at Dissent! This astonished me. It was strange enough that someone my age had found his way to a publication born out of the Shachtmanite schisms of the early fifties—here were men and women in their twenties, funny, lively people, good writers, interested in the labor movement, but also in anti-corporate feminism, TV culture, Green politics, and Central American teen-agers. With a new editor, the historian Michael Kazin, they would breathe new life into Dissent long after the deaths of its first editors and writers, who had always labored under heavier historical burdens.
Perhaps it should not seem strange that this tiny left-wing quarterly should be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary on Thursday night. Unlike less skeptical publications, Dissent never expected the socialist millennium to arrive in a blinding flash of light, so it had the stamina to outlast several generations of mirages and disillusionments. Unlike less committed publications, Dissent never lost sight of the vision of a better world, so it kept at the steady work long after others would have turned elsewhere with the shifting winds, or quit altogether.
Every generation produces young people with the kind of idealistic, undogmatic politics that animates Dissent. For this reason, its importance seems to me incommensurate with its size and even its readership. A modest utopia is still as necessary as bread and shelter, even today. Maybe today more than ever.
Images: Dissent Magazine
