From Democratiya to Dissent

The online journal Democratiya launched in 2005. Sixteen issues, one book, and a quarter-million readers later, Democratiyais being incorporated into Dissent. Why? Well, when Dwight Macdonald closed Politics, his "one-man magazine," in 1949, he cited the relentless demands of producing a little magazine: the lack of time it gave him for reflection; his growing sense of ignorance; and, of course, the bleak political climate that descended on every intelligent anticommunist and democratic socialist in the late 1940s. Not to mention the demands of fundraising for little magazines. As the late Dissent editor Irving Howe put it, "You have to smile when you want to sulk...But [you] can never be self-supporting, [so] it's stick in one hand, cup in the other, and off you go."