Books June 1989
Arriving where she started
A review of Horse-Trading & Ecstasy by Barbara Probst Solomon.
Barbara Probst Solomon Horse-Trading and Ecstasy.
North Point Press, 255 pages, $18.95
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...
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