Editor's Page

If poetry, as Wordsworth wrote, "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," political thought should take its origin from contention and anger similarly recollected. I suspect that tranquility is in short supply among our writers, but still, we try in this issue to figure out what happened last November and how liberals and leftists should respond-and we try to do this calmly, quietly, thoughtfully. The questions are urgent, of course, and we are hardly finished with contention and anger. But we do need to step back a bit and think hard. The recent discussions around the "death" of environmentalism provide a useful model: arguments that don't stop at posture and presentation but raise difficult questions about intellectual substance and political strategy.