I was often reminded of Mr. Kristol’s observations while reading The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin’s new book about the culture wars. Indeed, Mr. Gitlin, who is currently a professor of “culture and communications, journalism, and sociology” at New York University, cites part of the passage I quoted—but not, as anyone familiar with his earlier work will doubtless have surmised, in order to agree with it. On the contrary, this former president of Students for a Democratic Society and longtime professional radical adduces Mr. Kristol’s judgment as a prime example of how “ideologues of the Right,” who nowadays lack “external barbarians” to fight against, have begun “to search for domestic ones” in order to manufacture a “moral equivalent of the Cold War.”

This might seem an odd conclusion for someone writing a book whose subtitle is “Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars” and who tells readers that his “chief aim is to understand where our symbolic melodramas come from, and what these distortions and distempers [a favorite word] reveal and conceal about the perennial dilemmas of American identity and the contemporary incapacity of American politics.” After all, either the culture wars are a problem or they are not; and if Mr. Gitlin proposes to explain why America is “wracked” by culture wars and various “distempers,” then presumably he thinks that such conflicts are a problem, too. It’s not a matter of “searching” for barbarism but simply recognizing it for what it is—namely barbarism. Perhaps Mr. Gitlin believes that only someone whose left-wing credentials are in order may pronounce on such important matters. In any event, this—what shall we call it? a paradox? an anomaly? a tension?—crops up again and again in the pages of Mr. Gitlin’s short book. It is of course edifying to learn that “the alarmism of Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Irving Kristol makes an easy target.” But what of Mr. Gitlin’s alarmism? (Or shall we say his distempers?) He provides his book with an epigraph from Frederick Douglass warning that the slaveholder is “every hour silently but surely whetting the knife of vengeance for his own throat.” Who is the “slaveholder” in Mr. Gitlin’s drama? What “vengeance” does Mr. Gitlin imagine (or perhaps even long for)? It would be an excellent thing to explain why America is “wracked by culture wars.” Mr. Gitlin does not, alas, manage to do this. But considered symptomatically, as a kind of case study of disappointed leftism, The Twilight of Common Dreams does have something to teach us. There can be few books that dramatize their author’s confusions quite so patently. And in this sense, regarded as a compendium of contemporary left-wing rationalizations, Mr. Gitlin’s book is worth examining by anyone interested in the fate of our culture.

Not that tracing the book’s argument is always an easy task. To be sure, Mr. Gitlin is a canny and articulate writer. And as a bona fide Sixties radical (he was born in 1943 and spent many years teaching at the University of California at Berkeley), Mr. Gitlin knows the terrain of the culture wars from the inside, as it were. Yet if he is a bona fide Sixties radical, he is (like so many American radicals) one who was early on absorbed into the academy. As usual, the union of radicalism and academia produces a slightly comic, not to say unreal, effect. There is something about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous. Professor Gitlin is very earnest when he utters words like “inequality,” “poverty,” “racism,” and so on, which he does early and often. Clearly, he is a man in search of a movement. He is never happier than when declaiming against the “stupefying degree of inequality in American society” or informing the reader that “males in Bangladesh have a better chance of living past age forty than males in Harlem.” (There are many such assertions in this book.)

But somehow Mr. Gitlin’s complaints never quite crystallize into a coherent picture. This is partly because the radicalism of Mr. Gitlin’s youth has gotten away from him. What started with the Free Speech Movement in the early Sixties (a “decisive innovation” in Mr. Gitlin’s assessment) has somehow mutated into a situation where speech is routinely censored by the commissars of political correctness. This puts Mr. Gitlin in an uncomfortable position. He likes to talk about “freedom,” “maintaining solidarity with the oppressed,” and so on. But today’s academic radicals are generally partisans of one or another species of identity politics—feminist, ethnic, sexual, or all of the above. Although they adamantly deny that such a thing as political correctness exists—especially when the charge comes from a source identified as “conservative”—they nonetheless eagerly pursue a policy of political correctness, subjecting speech, the curriculum, hiring and recruitment practices, and myriad other things to political tests. Mr. Gitlin knows this. Accordingly, his difficult task in this book is to distance himself from the essentially repressive practices of today’s radicals without tarnishing his own radical credentials. This makes for some interesting, if not convincing, intellectual acrobatics. He concludes that radical curricular reforms, which led to the establishment of black studies programs, feminist studies, and so on have been a “net good”; at the same time he decries the identity politics they presuppose as “a very bad turn for American life.” The movement for political correctness is “virtually self-satirizing,” but among its “benefits” are instilling “a sense of community” among its partisans.

A self-satirizing benefit is only one of the wondrous creations Mr. Gitlin conjures for his readers’ entertainment. One of his chief targets is that species of identity politics that makes leftish “bridge building” impossible. And to this end Mr. Gitlin presents himself in the role of conciliator, welcoming all (left-leaning) people into his big tent. At the same time, his liberal white guilt over past injustices keeps intruding: “Why,” he asks, “should the descendants of slaves have to make compromises, pitch in, help form majorities?” The answer, of course, is because they are no longer slaves but citizens.

There are two main themes and one underlying assumption in The Twilight of Common Dreams. The themes are, first, that the Enlightenment idea of a common humanity that transcends such contingencies as race, sex, class, and ethnic origin articulated a worthy, universalist ideal and that (the second theme) this ideal has been jeopardized with the rise of identity politics, multiculturalism, etc. Put in this bald fashion— something that Mr. Gitlin is careful to avoid doing—one might think that Mr. Gitlin had turned over a new, conservative leaf. After all, conservative writers have been making this basic argument ever since the phenomenon of identity politics was first descried. But Mr. Gitlin’s underlying assumption is that the conservative attack on political correctness, multiculturalism, and their attendant social and intellectual pathologies is fundamentally unsound because … well, because it is conservative.

I am not sure that Mr. Gitlin is an especially good guide to the nature of Enlightenment ideals. For example, his observation that “the Enlightenment says human beings are born and die, and in between, they seek to live” does not inspire much confidence on this score. Nor is it clear that the Enlightenment ideals he wishes to champion are historically the sole possession of the Left, as he seems to assume. (In fact, it is not even clear that they are exclusively the products of the Enlightenment: the idea of a universal common humanity, for instance, is at least as old as Christianity.) In any event, the maunderings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau do not, fortunately, exhaust the riches of the Enlightenment.

But Mr. Gitlin is desperate to claim the mantle of the Enlightenment for the Left, and he is willing to go to considerable, indeed, tendentious lengths to do so. Thus: “the idea of the Left and the idea of America share a history—I am tempted to say also a destiny. They are the two great, heavily burdened ideas of the Enlightenment.” Burdened, indeed. For Mr. Gitlin, everything good about the Enlightenment is colored pink; and by the same token, everything he doesn’t like about the Left is a betrayal of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, he asks us (it is one of his major themes) to distinguish between “the late New Left politics of separatist rage” (bad) from “the early New Left politics of universalist hope” (Mr. Gitlin’s era, and therefore good).

What he does not understand is how the very logic of radicalism, by absolutizing freedom, leads inexorably to tyranny. This is one of the chief lessons of the French Revolution, which begins with Rousseau and ends with Robespierre. It is not an accident that the French Revolution was conceived and prosecuted as a triumph of Rousseavian “virtue.” Nor is it surprising that the virtue that appeared as a species of narcissism in Rousseau should turn rancorous when it entered upon the stage of politics. Not for nothing did Robespierre speak of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”

Mr. Gitlin’s discussion—or, rather, invocation—of the legacy of the Enlightenment is not the only vertiginous thing about his book. His unremitting effort to lodge all virtue with the Left makes for a veritable chapbook of silly remarks, to wit: “What we are witnessing in the culture wars is not the triumph of the Left but its decline.” Or: “The Republican tilt of white men is the most potent form of identity politics in our time.” Also delicious is his citation of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour as evidence of “the rightward shift in the media” and his assurance that “Marx objected only to shallow universalisms.” Gee. Sometimes Mr. Gitlin descends to mere epithet-slinging, as when he describes the great industrialist Henry Ford as a “proto-Nazi.” Never mind that Ford did more for the working men of America than a million professors of “culture and communications, journalism, and sociology” will ever do, no matter how many times they have read Das Kapital. Henry Ford’s position as a capitalist requires that he be demonized.

A good deal of this book is an exercise in excuse making. In his effort to salvage an attractive universalism of the Left, Mr. Gitlin is constrained to explain—or explain away—a number of inconvenient realities. And it must be said that, when it comes to simple brashness, anyway, he is rather expert at this. What about the rampant anti-Americanism of the New Left? (Remember “Amerika,” flag-burnings, the vitriolic and frequently violent demonstrations against every aspect of American society?) Not to worry. According to Mr. Gitlin, such anti-Americanism as the New Left exhibited was “more a sentiment than a commitment.” In one inadvertently telling passage, he explains that a “sufficiently broadminded onlooker” would have discerned that the anti-American antics of the New Left and the thousands they influenced were really only the “the rage of the rejected child pleading to be let in and loved.” Those who rejected the New Left, he continues, were “too narrow, too resentful, too negative” in their Americanism; moreover, they were too literal, taking the attacks mounted by such spokesmen for the New Left as Abbie Hoffman “at face value.” How ought they have been taken?

At bottom, The Twilight of Common Dreams is a book by a man of the Left who has been outflanked by the Left—something for which he cannot forgive the Right. That is to say, Mr. Gitlin wants to blame conservatives for the crepuscular gloom he discerns settling over his most cherished ideas. He is an old-style political activist who cannot acknowledge that the triumph of his principles has led to the eclipse of his ideals. He bemoans the fact that the Left has been (in the words of one of his chapters) “Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House.” But there is an important sense in which this very phenomenon is at the heart of his subject, the culture wars. Far from signaling a “decline” of the Left, the institutionalization of radical sentiment in the university, the media, Hollywood, and indeed, in the landscape of American life represents the triumph of the ideals Mr. Gitlin and his comrades have been fighting for since the early Sixties. The startling and, to some, depressing fact is that conservative electoral victories have made nary a dent in the march of left-wing attitudes and ideas in our culture. That Mr. Gitlin’s ideals look different when actually realized from when he dreamed about them as a twenty-something radical is a painful but common irony that attaches to all utopian projects.

The real importance of Mr. Gitlin’s book lies not in its analysis of the culture wars but in its status as a specimen of the kinds of rationalizations we can now expect from one large precinct of leftist ideology. On most cultural matters, Mr. Gitlin comes down firmly on both sides of the issue. He grudgingly acknowledges that conservatives have “accurately observed” the radicalization of “Harvard, Hollywood, the Modern Language Association, … the National Endowment for the Arts,” etc. But he dismisses the significance of those observations with a host of anodyne clichés and equivocations: when it comes to the culture wars “the issue is not the issue,” there are “two sides to all the usual disputes,” and so on. The overall effect of Mr. Gitlin’s efforts to explain why America is “wracked” by culture wars is to trivialize the issues over which those wars are being fought. This is partly because Mr. Gitlin insists on blaming conservatives for the factionalism he discerns on the Left today, but it is also, I suspect, partly because he does not really take the culture wars very seriously. Mr. Gitlin is most at home in that realm where “rights” endlessly proliferate and the chief thing necessary for occupying the high moral ground is plenty of talk about racism, exploitation, and the perfidy of American society. Thus at the end of his book, he speaks of “the right to a job, education, medical care, housing, retraining over the course of a lifetime” as “the bare elements of an economic citizenship that ought to be universal.” One can be sure that were such “rights” acknowledged, Mr. Gitlin would be back instanter with a more extravagant list.

Toward the end of his 1987 paean to the counterculture, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Mr. Gitlin noted that he wrote “not just about history but imprisoned within it, enclosed within the aftermaths of the Sixties, trying to peer over the walls.” Those walls have been higher and more confining than he perhaps bargained for. Mr. Gitlin offers himself as a champion of the Enlightenment and its ideal of common humanity. Yet his idea of universality has a distinctly gauchiste tang to it. In his short classic, “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant wrote that the motto of Enlightenment thought was Sapere aude! “Dare to know!” Mr. Gitlin would have us revise Kant to read, “Dare to be Left!” It’s not an Enlightenment that everyone will want to embrace.

Notes
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The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, by Todd Gitlin; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 294 pages, $25. Go back to the text.