Getting Right with the Cold War: A Debate with Joanne Barkan

It would seem that Dissenters and others on the left have a hard time getting over the cold war. Pieces about the cold war not only filled the Summer 2006 issue but have appeared before in the magazine's pages- including my own reconsideration of Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center (Winter 2005) and Jeffrey Isaac's brilliant defense of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Summer 2002). There was also George Packer's fine collected set of essays (it included pieces by Dissent editors Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin) that evoked the memory of 1930s fascism and 1940s communism and made explicit linkages between cold war liberalism and the sort of liberalism that Packer hoped to recover.