"Charged with Intensity"

"Gitlin remained politically involved after the '60s, but also clashed at times with fellow liberals. In the 1990s, he was critical of some of the academic debates over the literary canon and the predominance of male white writers. In his 1995 book 'The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars,' he alleged that the focus on what he and others called 'identity politics' was weakening the left overall, writing that while Republicans were gaining power in Washington, the left has been 'marching on the English department.'"

The Albany Times Union reports the death of Todd Gitlin.

And John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot looks back to Gitlin's 1995 book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wrecked by Culture Wars.

"We Need a Full Court Press for Democracy"

"Here in the United States, democracy is being whittled away on a daily basis. State laws are being passed that are designed to restrict voting, to enable partisan vote counting, and to help subvert election results. Phony audits and a campaign of disinformation about the 2020 election are undermining the legitimacy of our elections. An atmosphere of threats and even violence is being fostered, directed at election officials, school board officials, and other public servants just for doing their jobs according to the law."

Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol at The Bulwark call on President Biden to lead a "Campaign for American Democracy."

"More an End Than a Beginning"

"After les évènements in France in May came June's parliamentary elections, sweeping General De Gaulle's rightist party to power in a landslide victory. After the Prague Spring and the promise of 'socialism with a human face,' the tanks of the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact overran Czechoslovakia. In Latin America, the Guevarist guerrilla trend was everywhere repulsed, to the benefit of the right. In the US, the 'silent majority' roared. As the divided Democratic Party lay in ruins, Richard Nixon's Southern strategy turned the Party of Lincoln into the heir to the Confederacy. As the right consolidated around an alliance of Christian evangelicals, racial backlashers, and plutocrats, the left was unable, or unwilling, to fuse its disparate sectors. The left was maladroit at achieving political power; it wasn't even sure that was its goal."

At The New York Review of Books, Todd Gitlin remembers 1968.

"How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students"

"The erosion of reason does no favors for the campus or the left. Much of the history of the last century goes to show that equality, freedom, and reason rise and fall together. But Bloom's barrages of contempt, however viscerally launched, do not point the way toward an educational system that might serve democracy in crisis. In a world that mocks reason and, day by day, debases democratic potential, the American mind surely needs no further triviality, no further nihilism, no further closure. What it needs is an opening to our better angels. What it needs is the joy that comes when human beings reason our way through our troubles toward light."

Todd Gitlin at The Chronicle of Higher Education rereads Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind thirty years later.

And Nicholas B. Dirks writes in 2015 that "It is hard to avoid a feeling of nostalgia for the virulent days of the 'culture wars.'"

"No Protest, However 'Inclusive,' Should Wall Itself Off From What It's Arguing Against"

"There is an element of performance in all protest, necessarily. However, the 'safe space' rhetoric has permeated so deeply that, unintentionally, the left is using a display of weakness as strength. That is, in order to create change, one is to indicate grievous injury on the basis of things which, in the not too distant past, even politically concerned people considered something to walk on by, or make fun of.
"But as sociologist Todd Gitlin has noted, this kind of performed delicacy was alien to leftist protesters of the '60s and beyond."

John McWhorter at CNN criticizes efforts to ban controversial speakers from college campuses.

Heightening the Contradictions?

In Salon, Matt Stoller and Peter Coyote debate whether progressives should support President Obama.

As does Todd Gitlin.

Thomas Frank adds his thoughts.

"As presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both reflected the priorities of the second New Democrat coalition, uniting donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley with a 'new majority' coalition of racial minorities, immigrants, liberal women and young voters. Because Democratic voters are disproportionately poor, this has produced a Democratic party which, in economic terms, is an hourglass coalition of the top and the bottom. Economic populism frightens the party’s billionaire donors, while social populism, which has often been associated with white working class xenophobia, racism and religiosity, frightens blacks, Latinos, immigrants and white social liberals. The result is what Mike Konczal and others have called 'pity-charity' liberalism—a kind of liberalism which appeals to the sympathy of the rich for the poor, rather than appealing, as the New Deal did, to solidarity among the middling majority. It was a version of progressivism ill-suited to the Great Recession, which demanded the visionary leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt, not the managerial competence of a Nelson Rockefeller."

And Michael Lind predicts the end of the New Democrat.

"Every Time I Assume that It's All Over, It's Back"

"Here, said Gitlin, is why: 'The tectonic plates that broke loose in the '60s were extremely deep and were holding a lot of social and cultural tension that had been locked in place. And once those plates started moving, they remade the landscape. But the tensions are still in play.'"

Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times discusses how the 1960s influence today's politics.

"How Should Liberals Feel about Occupy Wall Street?"

Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Michael Kazin, and others at The New Repubic offer answers to the above question.

"He Stole the Show with the Finest Piece of Oratory Ever to Emerge from the White New Left"

"He was all-American, Midwestern, and original: 'We have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.' Was Soviet Communist not a rotten system? Of course. But 'my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.'"

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic eulogizes Carl Oglesby.

Most Peculiar, Mama

"Conspiracy theories spawned theories of who benefited from conspiracy theories. There was gold at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. Even Oliver Stone was not necessary. For example, Wheen notes, “It was A Clockwork Orange which convinced [Arthur] Bremer that he must shoot George Wallace [because he couldn’t get close to his first choice, Nixon], and Bremer’s assassination diaries then inspired Paul Schrader to create the character of Travis Bickle. So: without Bremer there would be no Taxi Driver, and without Taxi Driver John Hinckley Jr. wouldn’t have become so obsessed by Jodie Foster that, to prove himself a worthy rival to Bickle, he shot Ronald Reagan.” He’s not making this stuff up.

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic reviews Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia.

And That's the Way He Was

"Yet he was a reluctant star. He was genuinely perplexed when people rushed to see him rather than the politicians he was covering, and even more astonished by the repeated suggestions that he run for office himself. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman—his title was managing editor of the 'CBS Evening News'—and so did his audience."

Douglas Martin in The New York Times reports the death of Walter Cronkite.

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic writes an appreciation.

Roll Away the Stone

"Eric Alterman, a onetime Stone protégé, called the Stone-KGB stories 'smears,' 'phony,' and 'pathetic,' dismissing the whole contretemps as 'an almost entirely bogus controversy over whether Stone ever willingly spied for the Russians or cooperated with the KGB in any way. He did not.'
"KGB archival documents tell a different story."

In Commentary, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Alexander Vassiliev reveal that I. F. Stone worked for the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

Eric Alterman responds in The Daily Beast. (And here in The Nation.)

As does Todd Gitlin in The American Prospect.

David Oshinsky in Slate tries to sum up.

And in the Los Angeles Times, biographer D. D. Guttenplan argues that Stone was the "first blogger."

A Year of Hope and Rage

"The right way to remember the year 1968 is to give its complications their due. History is the most crooked of timbers. The egalitarianism of the civil rights movement and a spirit of cultural adventure commingled with a whole mélange of joyful and desperate reactions against white supremacy, senseless war, empty materialism and supine obedience. The result was a mutiny against all establishments, usually for good and sufficient reason, although ends were frequently violated by means."

In the Los Angeles Times, Todd Gitlin advises striving for balance when recalling 1968.

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.

Current Affairs

In the April 9 Los Angeles Times opinion pages, Todd Gitlin criticizes political sectarianism, Francis Fukuyama defends changing one's mind, Swati Pandey lists five political side-switchers, Charles Murray resurrects Richard Nixon's guaranteed annual income, and Jonathan Chait proposes an end-run around the electoral college.