Gitlin Out of There
Karl, Jonathan
Books Gitlin Out of There By Jonathan Karl Poor Todd Gitlin. The president of Students for a Democratic Society during the glory days of the New Left, he's a man with impeccable left-wing...
...Gitlin can diagnose the left's ills, but he's at a loss to find a cure...
...They saw him as a white male oppressor...
...At least he offers a start-an appeal to common sense and an end to the politics of identity: "For too long, too many Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders, lining their trenches with insulation...
...Gitlin's plea is to those whom D'Souza attacks, the befuddled left that has brought separatism, speech codes, and trivial studies to America's best universities...
...Enough bunkers...
...The course was free of great books by dead white guys...
...On this day, Gitlin was scheduled to screen The Times of Harvey Milk, a film about an assassinated gay San Francisco politician...
...The president of Students for a Democratic Society during the glory days of the New Left, he's a man with impeccable left-wing credentials-a true believer in the 1960s and a true believer today...
...He insists that the left's "main business" is undone: the mobilization for equality in the face of "an unbridled market" that "generates mass panic and beckons gangsterism, theocracy, and authoritarian crackdowns...
...In the end, Gitlin pleads for a new "universalist Left" that will fight the good fight for equality and the common good, but he is not optimistic...
...After all, these are his fellow travelers: In 1991, he was one of the first to join Teachers for a Democratic Culture, a group that extolled the virtues of recent "reforms" of university curricula and condemned the conservative critics "and like-minded writers in the press who are endangering education with a campaign of harassment and misrepresentation...
...A black man yelled: "We're dying out here...
...the "all-consuming blankness of Generation X." But, like the conservatives he hates, Gitlin finds the root of much of the problem in the political vanguard of the 1960s, especially the late 1960s, when the "movement" became both anti-American and consumed by "separatist rage...
...In fact, he feverishly attacks D'Souza and other conservatives, whom he calls "propagandists" worshipping "at the shrine of history but...
...and Gitlin is outraged: "They hold most of the jobs...
...Surveying the cultural wasteland of "identity politics," Gitlin is distraught...
...The checkout clerk, the investment banker, Slobodan Milosevic, and the Caucasian holding a VIETNAM VET WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign were grouped together...
...innocent of the facts...
...it merely contrasted the 1960s with the 1980s...
...The occasion was a two-day student strike called to demand accelerated race-based hiring and admissions...
...Hence: "While the Right was occupying the heights of the political system, the assemblage of groups identified with the Left were marching on the English department...
...In this way, he could show sympathy for the strikers' concerns and still meet his obligations to the university...
...He sees the multiculturalists attacking white male leftists, "lesbians of color" attacking white lesbians, and students unable to piece together a rational argument...
...This line has echoed in my mind often since...
...Newsweek asks, "Why would white men feel they are being pushed to the wall when they hold most of the jobs...
...Enough of the perfection of differences...
...It didn't matter that this professor was a left-wing activist of long standing who, by and large, agreed with the students' concerns...
...It may seem a little late for yet another book decrying the ways of campus radicals, but Gitlin brings a unique and long-overdue perspective...
...Instead, the left has crumbled into ever smaller and isolated subcultures each in "rivalry for the crown of thorns...
...On this fundamental question, Gitlin has no answer...
...By contrast, commonality offers-what...
...This, Gitlin insists, spells disaster for the left, which should be for that grand universal truth: equality...
...I asked him, "How is admitting more black students and hiring more black faculty going to stop the dying out there...
...people are willing to kill and die for their symbols...
...To them he breaks (belatedly) the bad news: The left is dead...
...Among those who joined with Gitlin were such politically correct heavies as Stanley Fish, Houston Baker, and Jonathan Culler...
...they recruit armies...
...Despite the student strike, Gitlin held the class, but he scrapped the film and dedicated the session to a discussion of the issues raised by the strike...
...Shortly after the discussion started, striking students barged into the lecture hall and started to howl in protest: How dare Gitlin hold a class during the student strike...
...Some things are true even if Dinesh D'Souza says them," Gitlin writes...
...But appeasement simply didn't work...
...He is not writing to agree with D'Souza, whose 1991 Illiberal Education chronicled the outrages of campus multiculturalism and helped fuel the backlash against "political correctness...
...But in April 1990, he found himself the object of attack from campus radicals at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Still, Gitlin is unwilling to go too far in his attack on "identity politics...
...On Day One of the strike, Professor Gitlin was scheduled to teach an introductory sociology course...
...He is the quintessential tenured radical, but he finds himself agreeing with much of the argument of those he despises most: conservatives...
...Instead, in his struggle to find out what went wrong, Gitlin finds a number of contributing causes: the attack on the Enlightenment's faith in reason by thinkers like Nietzsche, Weber, and Derrida...
...We ought to be building bridges...
...The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (Metropolitan Books, 279 pages, $25) is a blistering attack on the same phenomenon conservative critics like William Bennett, Irving Kristol, and Dinesh D'Souza have lambasted for years: the wackiness of the multiculturalist left seen most vividly at elite colleges and universities...
...No response, just more shouting at the middle-aged white male professor who dared conduct class during a student strike...
...So, what is a white male leftist like Todd Gitlin to do...
...He names very few names and repeatedly reminds us of the important victories won by the multiculturalists...
...Gitlin describes what happened next: I invited them to join the discussion...
...The discredited red flag...
...This puzzles Gitlin: "The oddity is that the Left, which once stood for universal values, seems to speak today for selected identities, while the Right, long associated with privileged interests, claims to defend the common good...
...But bridges to what...
...Jonathan Karl is a reporter for the New York Post and author of The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America's New Militias (HarperCollins...
...White and male, just like David Duke...
...real, raging racial inequality and injustice in America...
...Surveying the cultural scene, Gitlin sees conservatives arguing for universal values while the left balkanizes itself into a series of special interests clamoring for victim status...
...But, as he acknowledges, when he issues the clarion call to action, nobody follows...
...The blue banner of UN bureaucracy...
...Meanwhile, in Gitlin's view, America has gone to seed, with corporate barons growing richer and richer and the unfortunate descending further and further into poverty (Gitlin takes the economic argument for granted, only occasionally offering data to make his point...
...This is not a feel-good book: "The squandering of energy on identity politics, the hardening of the boundaries between groups, the insistence that individuals are no more than their labels, is an American tragedy...
...The only hope is to give up radical multiculturalism in favor of a universalist politics...
...There was no response...
...The ethnic nationalists have stronger emotional appeal: "They wave flags...
...they build monuments...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
