Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America.

In October 1992 Michael Tomasky, then a "card-carrying representative of the Village Voice," interviewed Newt Gingrich about the Georgia representative's political future. I'd like to be Speaker of the House, Gingrich told his interviewer, and I think I can do it within six years. Fat chance, Tomasky thought.

Just over two years later, the unthinkable occurred: Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in four decades and Gingrich, the firebreathing conservative, became Speaker of the House of Representatives. "Where have we gone wrong?" Tomasky, now a columnist at New York magazine, wondered. Why has the left "completely lost touch with the regular needs of regular Americans?" The answers, Tomasky writes in Left for Dead, lie largely in the multicultural politics, that dominate the current left-wing agenda. Around 1970 American radicals began to forge new political alliances based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Abandoning the more traditional, classbased politics of the union movement and the universalist ethos of the civil rights struggle, the left splintered into a wide array of racial and gender groups that seemed more interested in railing against "racist power structures" than in developing serious solutions to national economic and social ills.

The results, Tomasky argues, have been disastrous. Today radical feminists lead crusades against pornography, black activists inveigh against white racists, student radicals write rules banning hate speech on campus, and some gay and lesbian groups have asserted their equal rights by storming St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and exposing themselves on Fifth Avenue. The agendas, Tomasky argues, are narrow-minded, divisive, and irrelevant to the bulk of the American public. Relatively small in number, today's multiculturalists are so enfeebled that they have to rely on the courts to "impose solutions that lack broad public support." And if you don't support the official party line? You're "branded," Tomasky writes like someone who knows, "as an enemy of progress."

So how can the left resurrect itself? To answer that question, Tomasky examines four issues--welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care--on which the left is particularly weak. In each case, he makes clear that the left is bereft of ideas--interested primarily in expanding current programs while rejecting most attempts at reform. Instead of conceding, for example, that illegal immigration is a legitimate problem requiring humane solutions, many progressives simply denounce proposals to stem the tide of illegal immigration as xenophobic and racist.

Tomasky identifies a number of reforms that the left can, and should, support: increased border patrols, classbased affirmative action, a single-payer health care system. But he recognizes that it will take more than just a few policy modifications to revive his moribund cohort. It will require a new vision of left-wing politics. First, the cultural agendas that are so popular must give way to a more universalist orientation that emphasizes "our common humanity." It's okay, Tomasky explains, to acknowledge group differences based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But to become an influential political force, the left needs to "accept definitions of people ... that stretch beyond" the categories of race and gender. Second, progressives need to address the needs of American workers. A program based on shared economic grievances that protects U.S. labor from foreign competition, abolishes corporate welfare, and "put[s] people's livelihoods first" might appeal to a broader cross-section of working-and middle-class Americans.

There is little that's surprising in the 200-some pages of this book. Tomasky's vision of a class-based radicalism is at least a century old. In the 1890s Southern populists tried to unite black and white sharecroppers behind a program of sweeping economic reform; during the Great Depression, Communists and union organizers mobilized industrial workers of different races and ethnicities; and in the 1960s the Civil Rights movement attracted significant support from white unions.

Still, this is a compelling book. Tomasky's main argument--the left is unpopular, has no overarching vision that might attract large numbers of Americans, and has contributed, unwittingly, to the rise of the right--seems difficult to dispute. He offers a rarity in American political letters: a thoughtful, pragmatic critique of contemporary American radicalism. Eloquent, forceful, and above all compassionate, Left for Dead recognizes much that is noble about the current left, including concern for the downtrodden and vocal opposition to discrimination.

Tomasky, like so many other critics, recognizes that the left has "lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively about the things that concern them most: their jobs, wages, and standard of living; their quality of life (a dirty phrase to progressives); what they're getting from the government in return for their tax dollars; the life of their communities and the safety of their neighborhoods...." But his call for a new left focused on economic issues, although no panacea, is reminiscent of the best in the American radical tradition.

Resurrecting the left is a tall order, and I wouldn't place any money on an imminent radical revival. But you never know. Remember the American right of the early 1960s? Ridiculed and reviled by virtually every mainstream journalist, politician, and scholar, conservatives in those years began to distance themselves from extremists, campaign for like-minded political candidates, and develop positive programs that could appeal to disaffected Americans.

"They were smart," Tomasky writes. "They had new ideas and pushed them with vigor, and they took every opening their limping opposition gave them. They adapted." Like the '60s conservatives, today's progressives face a choice: they can continue the internecine struggles over narrow cultural and symbolic issues; or they can begin, as Tomasky suggests, to develop a more universalist, practical, and appealing approach to the nation's social and economic woes.