Todd Gitlin used to be a 1960s radical, an SDS (Students for a
Democratic Society) leader, a committed activist in the
protests movements of the period. He became one of the
tenured (former) radicals, a sociologist, professor of
journalism, and active “public intellectual.” He is also
author of books on the 1960s, the mass media, and
cultural-political trends in present-day American society.
Unlike many of his former colleagues, he distanced himself
from his youthful radicalism and became critical of what he
calls the “fundamentalist left.”

In this collection, as in
other writings, he displays an excellent grasp of the
adversarial mindset, noting, for example, that
“anti-Americanism, was, and remains, a mood and a
metaphysics more than a politics. It cannot help but see
practical politics as an illusion entangled … with a
system fatally flawed by original sin … an archipelago of
bitterness.”
He rejects the negativity,
self-righteousness, “pride in marginality,” anarchistic
leanings, and “intellectual slovenliness” on the left. He
sees “the fundamentalist left … negat[ing] politics in
favor of ideology.” That is to say, he is disturbed by what
he sees as the left’s withdrawal from practical politics. He
observes correctly that the left “has been clearer about
isms to oppose—mainly imperialism and racism—than about
values and policies to further.”
But he exaggerates the
left’s hostility to all authority; after all, the New Left
(including C. Wright Mills) admired radical revolutionary
movements and systems, their leaders and power; their
progeny still do, as witness the new political