When Irving Howe and Lewis Coser started Dissent in 1954 as a quarterly magazine of independent left-wing thought, they imagined they would be lucky to last a year. Their budget was too small, and the forces against them — both the McCarthyism of national politics and the sectarian dogmatism of the broader American left — were too strong.
So they probably would never have imagined that a crowd of nearly 200, including a notable contingent of people in their 20s, would show up on Thursday at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers in Lower Manhattan for a gala dinner celebrating the magazine’s 60th birthday.
Dissent’s circulation has long hovered around 5,000. But its influence has been outsize, as testified by a guest list that included distinguished journalists and academics (in addition to Anita Hill and former Representative Barney Frank) but no genuine celebrities, as one attendee proudly noted. “Dissent has been one of the great incubators of socialist, leftist, and even liberal ideas,” Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, said during the evening’s cocktail hour.
And now, the magazine is also home to a new generation of Internet-savvy editors and writers who are helping to connect its journalism to younger readers who may know little of its legacy but are eager for its brand of analysis all the same.
“The number of people who identify explicitly with democratic socialism is small,” said Sarah Leonard, 25, an associate editor. “But when we publish left critique of the economy, it makes instinctive sense to people who are growing up with student debt and recession.”
The evening was a celebration of the political philosopher Michael Walzer, 78, the magazine’s recently retired longtime co-editor, who gave an elegiac speech that summed up the magazine’s mission as standing “on the side of the excluded.” But it also indirectly signified a generational passing of the torch.
While the magazine is led by Michael Kazin, 65, a historian at Georgetown University, its day-to-day operations are run out of New York by a full-time editorial staff of four with an average age of 25.
The new crowd has built bridges to upstart left-wing publications like Jacobin and The New Inquiry, started a podcast called “Belabored” (hosted by the young labor journalist Sarah Jaffe) and infused some cultural sass into a magazine that, despite publishing Norman Mailer’s famous essay “The White Negro” in 1957, has never been accused of being hip.
The most recent issue, dedicated to “The Crisis of the European Left,” has offerings from old lions like Frances Fox Piven, but also a cheeky essay by Katie J. M. Baker, a former staff writer at Jezebel now at Newsweek, on an international pickup artist whose efforts at manipulative seduction were shut down by the empowered women of Denmark’s social-welfare state.
The essay, which drew more than 100,000 Web hits (and whose title is unprintable here), may have prompted some double takes among longtime subscribers. Mr. Kazin, however, said it was very much in the Dissent tradition of engaging with the world as it is.
“It connected politics and something people care about, sex — or rather, lack of sex,” he said.
Dissent’s Web site also drew big traffic this year with a special issue on feminism, featuring Ms. Jaffe’s essay “Trickle-Down Feminism,” and a 3,500-word critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” by Kate Losse, a former speechwriter for Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and now a freelance writer.
“It’s wonderful to have a place where you can really go into detail,” Ms. Losse, who is in her mid-30s, said. “It feels good to contribute to that intellectual lineage.”
The Occupy movement may have helped catalyze a younger audience for Dissent’s journalism. But the newest editors say they have no more illusions about the prospects of utopian transformation than the magazine’s founders did.
“We like to think of ourselves as keeping the flame alive,” Nick Serpe, 26, an associate editor, said over dinner. “But at the same time, we know it’s still not that big a fire.”
An article on Monday about Dissent magazine misidentified the site of a dinner in Manhattan that celebrated its 60th birthday. It was at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, a local New York City union — not at the American Federation of Teachers, a national organization with which the United Federation is affiliated. The article also misidentified the publication for which Katie J. M. Baker, who wrote an essay in the most recent issue of Dissent, works. While she was formerly a staff writer for Jezebel, she is now with Newsweek.