Barbara Probst Solomon has fueled an entire career on what one might call retroliberal nostalgia. A diverse group, retroliberals range from editors of The New Republic, that stronghold of Fifties liberalism, through the bow-tied, Trumanesque presidential candidate Paul Simon, and on to any number of tweedy university types. Though ununited by any specific creed, retroliberals share a common pride in their independence from the current liberal establishment, along with a common distrust for the New Left and its offshoots, from Jesse Jackson to deconstruction, and an equal distaste for anything that sounds at all like conservatism. They also share a general nostalgia for the intellectual and political world that sprang up among deserters from the Stalinist Old Left during the mid-1930s—with the founding of Partisan Review—and continued through the late 1950s, when the dreaded New Left made...

 
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