Contentions is the
most exciting blog yet. It is full of interesting writing by some
of our leading public intellectuals, ... you will never feel you have
enough time to read it. Here is a short list of the current writers of
this offspring of Commentary.
Contentions is a follow-on to a newsletter created by Midge Decter as pointed out in The Weekly Standard:
"THE SCRAPBOOK is old enough to remember with fondness and more than a little nostalgia the original Contentions, a monthly publication of Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World, which like that fine organization closed its doors with its mission accomplished--the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the valedictory December 1990 issue of Contentions, Midge
noted that among the important work carried out by her committee was to
oppose "the anti-Americanism of the fashionable liberal and leftist
intelligentsia," which "represented a very real danger to the country,
for inevitably over time it was bound to produce a terrible
demoralization. Even the citizens of a sturdy democracy cannot resist
forever the erosions of a culture that continually disconfirms their
beliefs, their principles, their very daily lives. A demoralized
society cannot mount a defense of itself, in the end not even in that
bedrock definition of defense as the military means necessary to hold
off an enemy bent on your destruction.
Alas, there is an all-too-contemporary sound to those words, without the good cheer that accompanied them in 1990. Happily, there is a new Contentions to pick up where the original left off."