Dissent is an American quarterly magazine of politics and culture that has been publishing since 1954, making it one of the longest-running left-wing intellectual journals in the United States. The magazine was founded during the McCarthy era by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser as a space for democratic socialist thought at a moment when such ideas were under sustained political attack. Seven decades later, it continues to publish the kind of thoughtful, rigorous, and unafraid political writing that its founders believed American democracy requires.
The editorial approach is intellectual without being academic, political without being partisan in the narrow sense. Dissent publishes essays, reportage, reviews, and criticism that engage with the full range of progressive politics — labour, inequality, race, climate, foreign policy, culture — with a commitment to argument, evidence, and the proposition that the left is strongest when it thinks carefully about what it actually believes.
In a political media landscape that rewards heat over light, Dissent has spent seventy years choosing light. The magazine exists for readers who believe that political convictions are not weakened by intellectual honesty but strengthened by it — and that the most important political conversations are the ones that happen between people who agree on the destination but disagree on the route.