The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars.

Todd Gitlin Henry Holt, $25 By Jonathan Alter

My idea of hell on earth would be life as a lefty professor at Berkeley in the 1980s and early 1990s. A conservative could oppose the politically correct idiocy, but as a liberal professor I would have felt obligated to uphold the basic values of my creed, while quietly enduring the most appalling manifestations of multiculturalism. Some of that is receding now--the demands to spell "women" as "womyn" seem a tad off the point--but for a while, it was bad.

Todd Gitlin, a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of books on the 1960s and the media, has lived that hell and survived to tell the tale. In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin delivers a devastating description of how identity politics have wrecked the American left, which he contends, is pretty much confined to academia these days.

Gitlin's survey of the left's demise is cogent and useful, and his stories of academic life are harrowing. "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," he writes. It was the irrelevance as much as die pettiness of liberal academic politics that's so annoying--the "rapture of marginality," in Gitlin's words, "the narcissism of small differences" in Freud's.

Gitlin is especially good in connecting academic fads like Michel Foucault with the descent into absurdity. "From `the personal is political' it was an easy glide to `only the personal is political'--that is, only what I and the people like me experience ought to be the object of my interest," he writes. The examples, such as the group of women of color who staged a walkout from a women's studies course at the University of Michigan in 1991 because "only one-third" of the assignments were written by women of color, are familiar, but Gitlin gives such fundamental irrelevancies a personal twist and illuminating context.

In 1992, for example, the sociology department at Berkeley nominated a French leftist named Loic Wacquant for a professorship in Chicano studies. He was perfectly politically correct, except that he had applied late, didn't specialize in Chicano studies, and was reputed to be a "bad listener." A boycott of Wacquant ensued, and it became the main activity of the left even as California's state government was savaging the budget for all levels of education. Such misplaced priorities remind Gitlin of the story of the fool on his hands and knees searching the sidewalk under a streetlight. "What are you looking for?" a passerby asks. "My watch." "Where did you lose it?" "Over there," says the fool, pointing to the other side of the street. "Then why are you looking here?" asks the passerby. "Because it's dark over there," says the fool.

Gitlin is also hard on the mainstream press for describing political correctness as a new McCarthyism. "P.C. did not, in fact, haul miscreants up before congressional committees," he writes, "fire or flunk non-conformists, pillory them in the press or take their passports away." But Gitlin's attack on the anti-P.C. overkill misses the point. Just as liberals earlier in the century had to purge communists from their ranks, the radical multiculturalists he's taking on must be fought, not just reasoned with. It's hard--even paradoxical--to build a commonality movement by excluding people, but as Hubert Humphrey and other liberals learned in the 1940s, it's the only way.

"For too long," Gitlin writes, "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."

Yes, but cooperating with other factions in opposition to the right is not nearly enough. We need to totally redefine what it means to be progressive, liberal, or of the "left." In part, that will mean subordinating individual causes and identities, such as ethnicity, to a larger, common interest. Tony Blair, the likely next prime minister of Great Britain, has begun to do that with the Labor Party. If Bill Clinton had been more clear-headed might have done it here. It is gratifying to see a bona fide liberal break free o liberal dogma. For those who didn't know it before, Gitlin has illuminated the wrong turn we made and shown us where we shouldn't go. Next, maybe someone can muster the vision to show us where we should. Jonathan Alter is a columnist for Newsweek.