The Twilight of Common Dreams; Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. - book reviews

Like many today, Todd Gitlin mourns the eclipse of common dreams and deplores the narrow identity politics that fuels our escalating culture wars. But, unlike many who express similar concerns, he unflinchingly writes as a man of the Left, which, notwithstanding the admirable values he defends, occasionally draws him into blind alleys. Gitlin's views frequently echo those of Jean Bethke Elshtain, the late Christopher Lasch, and a variety of other fervent proponents of social justice, civility, and democratic renewal, but he appears considerably more wedded than they to social and economic policies that depend heavily upon the intervention and expenditures of the federal government. Consequently, even at his most thoughtful and humane--and he is incontrovertibly both--he risks confusing his readers about his own position, not to mention misestimating the prospects for an easing of our national travails.

By way of dramatizing the excessive forms that identity politics may assume, Gitlin opens Twilight o Common Dreams with an account of the battle over the adoption of a textbook that wracked the schools and city of Oakland, California. In this instance, the victory of the multicultural extremists left the school children and teachers of Oakland without any textbook at all. Gitlin sadly acknowledges the unconscionable "squandering of energy" in which the "obsession with separate identities" has resulted, conceding that "identity politics is a very bad turn." How can it be, he asks throughout the book, that the Left, which once "stood for universal values," has succumbed to an expanding congeries of special interests, while the Right, which has always stood for special interests, can get away with the claim that it represents the common good?

Much of the remainder of the book develops the claims that the Left, in embracing identity politics, has betrayed its history and purpose and that the Right has never stood, and does not now stand, for the common interests, much less identity, of American society. In attempting to explain how we could ever have reached our current disastrous condition, Gitlin begins with the claim that the very idea of American commonality, or time-honored national identity, is a myth which emerged from the exigencies of mobilization during the First and Second World Wars and was fed by the hysteria of the McCarthy period, only to unravel under the debacle of Vietnam and the economic changes that followed upon the consolidation of a global market. We have always been, he insists, a heterogeneous society, composed of a myriad of groups with discrete purposes and interests. Worse, the powerful never delivered on their vaunted political promises of equality and freedom. To the contrary, they built their fortunes and prestige upon the enslavement of Africans, the dispossession of American Indians, the exploitation of workers of all ethnicities, and the oppression of women. Under these centrifugal conditions, the Left preeminently came to stand for the universal human values of the equality among and dignity of all persons notwithstanding differences of race, sex, national origin, and religion.

Gitlin takes great, and frequently justifiable, pride in the legacy of the Left in this regard, although, in any number of ways, he sorely shortchanges the claims of those he views as class enemies. The Constitution, for example, does not contain a word about the equality of individuals--only about equality among the states. And it was framed in a period in which most of the world still accepted, and many parts of it still practiced, various forms of unfree labor, including slavery, and virtually the entire world took the subordination of women to men as natural. Gitlin is less than fair in charging its elite framers with bad faith because their vaunted "equality" excluded slaves and women. The Founders were honest men who could speak of equality while holding slaves and upholding male authority because they understood equality in accordance with a Christian tradition that recognized human rights within a structure of social hierarchy. Like most contemporary critics, Gitlin is not hearing what they, for better or worse, actually said.

American history has never divided into the neat Manichaean confrontation between privileged elites (bad) and oppressed groups (good). The antislavery movement and, especially, the Republican party, included a goodly share of wealthy and powerful individuals, many of whom would grow wealthier and more powerful with Emancipation. The cutting edge of the final push for woman suffrage came from the National Woman's Party, the members of which were frequently affluent and openly opposed special attention to the needs of working women. As these and countless other examples demonstrate, the division of civic virtue and moral responsibility between the Right and the Left has never been as clear-cut as Gitlin would wish. The wealthy have normally tended to protect their wealth and frequently to increase it at the expense of others, but they have of(en divided among themselves in their assessment of tactics and principles. Nor have working people consistently resisted the temptations of racism, sexism, and ethnic chauvinism.

These caveats should hardly deserve mention were it not that they point to the central weakness in an otherwise fine book, namely Gitlin's determination to resuscitate the Left by unilaterally discrediting the Right. Few commentators upon the contemporary scene under stand the depressing complexity and disquieting prospects for change better than Gitlin, as his chapter on the social and economic transformation of the United States during the last thirty years confirms. He cogently, if rapidly, sketies the world with which we have all become too familiar--a world in which the gap between rich and poor has greatly expanded, the chances of children to do as well as, much less better than, their parents have evaporated, and the importance of interest groups in garnering scarce resources has mushroomed. No one understands better than he that the politics of identity is dividing those who most need a common allegiance and program. And, having argued that this politics directly serves mega-corporations' palpable interest in reducing communities and families to so many competing atoms, I was delighted to see Gitlin advance a similar argument. Yet for all his intelligence, humanity, and courage in protesting the excesses of the politically correct multiculturalism that has stormed the nation's schools and college campuses, Gitlin remains imprisoned by a vision of what would constitute a worthy Left that may not be adequate to our times.

Gitlin is at his best and most moving in defending the universalistic and, yes, Enlightenment legacy of the Left, which has traditionally insisted upon uniting people solely on the basis of their class position. He correctly denounces personal or identity politics as the direct legacy of fascism and reaction. He even bravely acknowledges that the African-American experience may indeed be unique and not easily respond to anyone's preconceived models. And withal, he clings to the necessary beneficence of federal programs and enhanced federal spending, thus implicitly endorsing a welfare-state model of justice. One might think that the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the well-documented difficulties with which the Western European states are wrestling might encourage us to think along new lines. One might even think that some of the ideas of those whom Gitlin dismisses as the Right merited attention, notably the need to strengthen two-parent families and private support for children. Gitlin knows that the so-called Right is no monolith, but he is not much interested in its internal divisions and discussions, and especially not in the Christian Right, which does not represent large corporations and rejects the free-marketeers' willingness to throw poor people on the garbage heap.

There are grounds for criticizing the Christian Right as there are for criticizing almost every political group today. We do confront a new and dangerous situation, and it is hardly surprising that no group has a neat solution. But before Gitlin decides that the United States never had a common culture, he might recall that Protestant Christianity has, from the arrival of Europeans, constituted the bedrock of American civil and, yes, political society. Today, Protestantism must share its place with Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and, in lesser measure, Islam, not to mention the myriad of other faiths. Withal, the fraying shreds of our national virtues remain Judeo-Christian, and their legacy includes respect for the individual person, the sanctity of marriage, and the mutual obligation of parents and children; charity to the weak; equality of souls before God if not equality of material condition; and, pace Gitlin, universalism. These virtues are under assault from the Left and the Right and, especially, from the triumph of the notion of the individual as consumer and as interest group, which both Left and Right feed. But it is difficult to imagine a renewal of Left or of Right which does not begin with the promise and the obligations this religious heritage imposes.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches at Emory University. Her most recent book is "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How the Elite Women's Movement Has Lost Touch with Women's Real Concerns (Doubleday).

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