A Patriotic Left

"And for this lost condition, he believes, the Left has only itself to blame. It embraced the smug disassociation from existing society epitomized in the sweeping call by émigré philosopher and '60s hero Herbert Marcuse for a 'Great Refusal' of the confining ideals and crass manipulations of the modern capitalist political economy. But the embrace of Marcuse's influential but ill-defined slogan has amounted in practice to a 'great withdrawal,' a narcissistic retreat into self-proclaimed 'marginality,' an obsession with ever more minute forms of identity politics and the infinite 'problematizing' of 'truth,' a reflexive opposition to America and the West, and an immurement in 'theories' whose radicalism is so pure that they never quite touch down to earth—follies all underwritten and protected by the perquisites and comforts of academia.
"Gitlin argues that the results may have benefited individual leftists, who have feathered their own nests quite nicely by fusing radicalism and academic careerism, but they have been unambiguously disastrous for the Left as a political force outside the academy. 'If we had a manual,' Gitlin remarks, 'it would be called, What is Not to Be Done.'

Wilfred M. McClay in the Claremont Review of Books reviews Todd Gitlin's The Intellectuals and the Flag.