True red, white and blue liberals

TODD GITLIN’S objective with his 11th book, “The Intellectuals and the Flag,” is “to contribute to a new start for the intellectual life on the left.” The former leader of the radical Students for a Democratic Society in the ‘60s aims “to resurrect a liberal ideal of patriotism in the awful aftermath” of Sept. 11, 2001, “refusing to bow to the notion that the proper reply to mass murder is plutocracy, zealotry, and indiscriminate war,” he writes in the introduction to this collection of essays.

Gitlin, a longtime professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, begins with a nostalgic look back at “three exemplary intellectuals” who made an impression 50 years ago and whose like he wishes to see again. First is David Riesman, the Yale University sociologist who in the 1950 book “The Lonely Crowd” coined the concept of the “other directed,” that is, the people who get their signals from the expectations and preferences of others, in contrast to the “inner-directed” and “tradition-directed.” Second is C. Wright Mills, the radical sociologist (also at Columbia) with his cogent, corrosive analyses of society, in such seminal works as “White Collar,” “The Power Elite” and “The Sociological Imagination.” Third is Irving Howe, editor of the left-wing quarterly Dissent for more than 38 years, who Gitlin calls “probably the most prolific literary critic of his generation.”

Next, Gitlin describes the “New Left” as a “self-undermining movement” in revolt even against legitimate authority. And the university, he observes sardonically, became “the main battlefield in the [left’s] struggle for power.... Tenure produced illusions of power.... Defeated in Washington, you could march on the English Department.”

Gitlin is similarly skeptical of “cultural studies,” an intellectual movement that he contends “stamps its seal of approval upon ... popular culture as a surrogate for politics.” He takes an even dimmer view of postmodernism, especially in the arts, for its “knowingness that rejects authenticity and dissolves commitment into irony.”

But the real tragedy, Gitlin writes, is that the left, “having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop” the Vietnam War, “then proceeded to commit suicide.” For many in the Vietnam generation, “the most powerful emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.” And in rejecting patriotism, he argues, the left disconnected itself from most Americans. To a veteran of the World War II generation, he notes, this attitude was understandable but exasperating. True, Vietnam was divisive; WWII, “the good war.” Still, where’s the problem in hating the policies of your government, in knowing some of the wrongs committed by our ancestors, and still loving your country?

Gitlin is unsparing in his condemnation of the Bush administration’s pursuit of the war on terror as a “one-nation tribunal of ‘regime change.’ ” He writes of feeling once again “the old anger and shame at being attached to a nation -- my nation -- ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, playing fast and loose with the truth, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government-slathered) interests yet quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.”

What, then, is his advice to intellectuals of the left? They must recognize, he declares, that dissent is all well and good but that the use of American power is not universally pernicious. They must think seriously about the role of this country abroad and how to combat political Islam, “a poisonous, nihilist, totalitarian creed.”

“Post Vietnam liberals,” Gitlin concludes, “have an opening now, freed of our sixties flag anxiety and our automatic rejection of the use of force. To live out a democratic pride, not a slavish surrogate, we badly need liberal patriotism, robust and uncowed.”

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Leonard Boasberg is a former Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board member and reporter.