No Time for Nostalgia

In 1985, when Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart lamented the hyper-individualism of American society, and when Robert Putnam a decade later struck a similar note in Bowling Alone, the left, such as it had become, without Marx, without socialism, willing to countenance the market in its place but unable to think through what that place might be-this chastened, cautious, and exhausted left took solace in jeremiads that, between the lines, told us there wasn't much we could do; the best days lay behind us.

But they don't.