Todd Gitlin’s new book, The Intellectuals and the Flag, has much in it to recommend to a reader wanting to reconstruct the critical practice of American intellectuals in the difficult aftermath of September 11, 2001.  With the self-stated goal of contributing “to a new start for intellectual life on the left” (1) Gitlin is sneeringly critical of the role of identity politics and the post-modern left in American political life.  With its roots in the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era, Gitlin argues that current intellectual life on the American left must re-conceive and reorganize itself if it is to have any hope of confronting, “a disciplined alliance of plutocrats and right-wing fundamentalist Christians”(2) that have come to dominate particularly in the post 9/11 era.   With the re-mobilization of the left in mind Gitlin tears into the American Empire of the Bush, years an era which is both a  “failing empire” and a “failing democracy”(148).  

Gitlin’s succinct summary of the failings of American political life is juxtaposed next to a post-modern left whose idea of “resistance” and use of identity politics was utterly incapable of filling the democratic void that had arisen in the United States following the Vietnam War.  Gitlin calls for a renewal of a “liberal patriotism, robust and uncowed”(155) and draws upon three neglected critical intellectuals of the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s to cue his alternate vision of a leftist patriotism: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe.  These stellar examples of a public intellectual life become a kind of home-grown antidote to the spurious influences of thinkers like Michel Foucault on the post-modern left that Gitlin feels must be relegated to the past if liberal patriotism is to return.

While I wholeheartedly agree with Gitlin’s critique of the American Empire and his valorisation of three important, and overly neglected, critical voices, Gitlin’s book represents such a caricature of so many other important critical voices on the twentieth century left, and ignores so many others, such as Gore Vidal, that it does far more harm than good in re-imagining what a re-motivated liberal patriotism could look like.  The legitimate critiques of the political failings of the post-modern left are lost in sweeping denunciations of such a broad range of critical voices, ranging from an undifferentiated critique of thinkers such as the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.  Conflating this broad range of thinkers under the banner of a fundamentalist left that is mired in its Manichean view of the world is inaccurate, unjustified, and ultimately self-defeating to the very project Gitlin advocates.  Intellectuals as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and the aforementioned Edward Said were, and are, consummate critics of the manichaeism in the cultural and political life of the twentieth century and, I would argue, are crucial to a reconceptualising of a new critical left perspective in American society that avoids some of the missteps of postmodernism.  It is a shame that Gitlin is not more nuanced and differentiating in his critical assessment of the contribution of so many dissenting leftist voices.  Ultimately, Gitlin reveals an underlying conservatism, which calls into question his vision of a liberal patriotic renewal.