A Living Tradition

Abstract:Dissent was first published at a low point for the American left. The editors decried the McCarthyist conflagration of the 1950s, which had cast a pall over radicals throughout the country, no matter how sterling their anti-Stalinist credentials. And repression wasn't the only problem. A combination of factors—a burgeoning consumer society, the strides made toward a welfare state during the Great Depression, the material dividends of global supremacy, and the nationalist spirit of the Cold War, to name a few—had relegated socialism to the margins of American life. The high tide of civil rights struggle and the second-wave feminist and gay awakenings were off in the future; union leaders had assumed a more conservative posture in the wake of Taft-Hartley. What did it mean to be a democratic socialist in such a moment?