The late Todd Gitlin (1943-2022) was perhaps one of the most astute and thoughtful commentators on the rise of identity politics from a Left perspective. Along with Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams (1995) is almost spooky in its prescience. The faculty fisticuffs, campus activism, and legislative squabbles over school textbooks in the 1990s might seem a bit tame by current standards, but the basic outline of our present predicament was there in nuce when Gitlin gave his two pennies on identity politics.
Like Eagleton, who was his precise contemporary, Gitlin took exception to the postmodern fog that coalesced in '80s academia and then rolled out into society at large in the 1990s. Always alert to the braying of green-ink Gingrichites, Gitlin was nevertheless perspicacious enough to appreciate the position taken by thoughtful individuals across the spectrum. He understood what dialectic is all about. A thesis has an antithesis. Moral finger-wagging and sermonizing just won’t cut it.
Of course, the politics of identity has simmered along through the 2000s, replicating, mutating, growing in the back alleys of the internet and the nascent personality complexes of Gen Z, only to metastasize rapidly as one catalyst after another has activated and accelerated the ID reactant through the late 2010s – austerity, social media, Trump derangement, the Lockdowns, the Summer of Peaceful Protest.
The sheer scale of the monster is now beyond the proportions sketched by Gitlin. The prickly way in which he defended ‘political correctness’ – PC – from prurient sticklers and conservative opportunists in the mid-90s has become woefully dated in 2023. His downplaying of censoriousness in the PC scare of the early ‘90s is completely out of place in our time, when a moment’s unintentional verbal misstep can land a person in the shit-can. Cancelation and censorship are not the paranoid shrieks of a disingenuous Right that is playing for keeps. They are real, they are here, and they can land upon anyone.
However, that was then and this is now. Gitlin’s foray into the field of identity politics is still valuable for us today, principally because he explained with great lucidity how there was a danger brewing on the Left that was not properly appreciated. Something deep, something steeped.
From within that space, he was able to locate and describe succinctly the defective seeds of today’s lost Left. His greatest lament was the morphing of what he called ‘the early New Left politics of universalist hope’ into ‘the late New Left politics of separatist rage’, and the budding formation of the ID legions of today. The fruit of that tree we now know all too well. Looking back to the late '60s and early '70s, he wrote…
But it was the late New Left politics of separatist rage, not the early New Left politics of universalist hope, that nurtured their recruits, the graduate students and young faculty who subsequently carried what is either harshly or wishfully called “the politics of the Left” into the academy and institutionalized (or interred) it there.
Identity politics became an organizing principle among the academic cohorts who followed, whose political experience, if any, began in the late 1960s or thereafter. Politics for them was the politics of interest groups – however laced with revolutionary rhetoric. By the time students born in the late 1950s and 1960s arrived on campuses, identity politics had become the norm of the “Left,” the tradition of protest. This generation had no direct memory of a unified Left. They had no feeling for a mass movement connecting campuses with off-campus politics. Democratic government. Their experience of active politics was segmented, not unified.
By 1975, the universalist Left was thoroughly defeated – pulverized, in fact. Defeat was pervasive, taken for granted. Cut off from ecumenical political hopes, the partisans of identity politics became preoccupied with what they might control in their immediate surroundings – language and imagery. Thus the singular influence of literary and cultural studies and the virtually self-satirizing obsession with rectifying the language of opponents’ (p. 146).
Familiar. But the origins are perhaps longer and deeper than most of us realize. Gitlin’s point is that ‘minoritarian thinking is also a generational heritage, an unwitting, authentically tragic extension of the born-to-lose protest spirit of the late 1960s’ (p. 231). Was Gitlin merely a New Deal romantic, who could not adjust to the post-68 world? Hardly likely. He was just skeptical that French rive gauche poststructuralism had the legs to take us into a new century. Gitlin foresaw where we have come. A tired, dispirited, and barren place where we are robbed of the means to build and organize movements for our collective betterment.
Sectarianism is the worm in the history of every all-or-nothing movement. But this is sectarianism with a distinctive and self-consuming logic. For identity-based movements, the margin is the place to be. Within each margin, there are always more margins to carve out. Postmodernist thought confirms that there is no center; or rather, that those who claim the center – who claim a common truth or even the possibility that a common truth is attainable – are false universalizers, colonizers, hegemonists. The center, if there is one, is the malevolent Other. But this false center – so the argument goes – is only a margin in disguise. The margins are bastions from which to launch intellectual raids on a center that has no right to be central, and has, moreover, lost confidence in itself.
Summoning philosophical allies from Paris, the partisans of difference as a supreme principle tack together a ramshackle unity based not so much on a universalist premise or ideal as on a common enemy – the Straight White Male who, trying to obscure his power and interests, disguises himself as the human in “humanism.” Within the identity groupings, humanism is dead, a dirty word, a ghost that deserves to be put out of its misery’p. 150).
From The Twilight of Common Dreams – a book that is actually very understanding and sympathetic to the genealogy and development of the postmodern Left – the take away is that new terms of commonality are necessary for any kind of reconstituted Left capable of meeting people’s needs in the 21st century – “What is a Left without a commons, even a hypothetical one? If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left” (p. 165).
Is the rot so inured that the only possibility is to strike out afresh? Do we take the opportunity of the Great Realignment through which we are living to cut the cords from the 20th century paradigm and compose a new one for the decades ahead? The answer might not yet be apparent, but the courage to renegotiate one’s relationship with the Legacy Left must be part of the mix. Something must be done, because the beast is eating itself up, and because a story of ever-decreasing circles has only one ending.
… the cultivation of separate identities is myopic for the Left above all. Instead of thinking deeply about how to produce majorities, leftists tend to list minorities as if they might simply gravitate to each other by magic. In truth, on the Left and among multiculturalists, majoritarian thinking is frowned on as a sign of accommodation (p. 231).
Majority. It’s a dirty word. The word itself is treated like a threat, but it isn’t really. It’s an aspiration. More than that, it is a necessary condition for properly pluralist association.
To recognize diversity, more than diversity is needed. The commons is needed. To affirm the rights of minorities, majorities must be formed’ (p. 236).
Gitlin was fairly emphatic about the need. Breaking from the sardonic tone that he generally maintains throughout, he ends The Twilight of Common Dreams with an exhortation.
For too long, too many Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders, lining their trenches with insulation. Enough bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences! We ought to be building bridges (p. 237).
The frustration in these lines is very recognizable. Three decades on, this call to action seems just as pertinent now as it was then. But what does he mean in this exasperated peroration? Not hands across the ocean or sappy acceptance of each other’s Difference, but a way of finding what is common among us and a genuinely universal horizon for our thought and action. This will demand originality, deftness, subtlety, sympathy, but simplicity and clarity. There is no turning back the clock, no restoration of a movement or tradition as it was. Maybe it will be something beyond Left/Right as we know it, but we had better get working on it. Gitlin is quite clear on the cost of failure.
It is more of the same soft apocalypse to which Americans have apparently grown inured: more inequality, more punishment of the poor, more demoralization and pathology among them, the slow (or not-so-slow) further breakdown of civil solidarities. A necessary if not sufficient condition for the reversal of these tendencies is the emergence of a vital left, but this is precisely what is thwarted by the obsession with group difference (p. 230).