E. J. Dionne, Jr.

Fifteen years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the English department,” the right took the White House.

More than they ever want to admit, intellectuals of the Left are influenced by the cultural politics that dominate their time. While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions, many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics.