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In the days after September 11, 2001, Todd Gitlin did a strange thing: "My wife and I decided to hang an American flag from our terrace" in New York City. This hardly seems to have been a strange thing for a lot of other Americans. Commuting between Paoli and Princeton that fall, I saw flags festooning overpasses, flapping from car windows and antennae, even painted on bedsheets draped from houses. But it was strange for Gitlin, so strange that he was riveted by the spectacle of his own behavior. This, remember, was Todd Gitlin: one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society, chronicler of the Sixties, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, and one of the poster boys for David Horowitz's "101 most dangerous academics in America." The only flag sds had ever revered was the North Vietnamese one. In 1969, Gitlin admits, "the American flag did not feel like my flag." And how could it, "when our people had committed genocide against the Indians, when the national history was enmeshed in slavery, when this experience of historic original sin ran deeper than any class solidarity, when it was what it meant to be American?"
The Intellectuals and the Flag
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And then, a few weeks later, Gitlin and his wife took the flag down. Between those two gestures lies the bulk of Gitlin's book, The Intellectuals and the Flag, and much of the agony of the American Left.
The American Left has always had difficulty understanding its own history, largely because there has never been anything you could call an American Right against which it could define itself. There was serious dissension about banks, corporations, and government sponsorship of commercial projects (road-building, canals, tariffs) throughout the decades between Jefferson and Lincoln. But apart from the American Tories and the most radical Calhounites, there was no serious American political movement in the early republic which dissented from liberal democracy or the premises of the Declaration of Independence or which thought monarchy was a good thing. Most of what passed for political debate was accusation and counter-accusation that someone was not taking democracy or the Declaration seriously enough.
As a result, there could be no American Left until liberalism itself had been defined as "the Right"—in other words, until Lockean liberalism and Jeffersonian democracy had ceased to be the gold standard and a completely different way of understanding social organization became a possibility. If the American Left needs a birthday to celebrate, it might be 1877 and the Homestead Strike; but a better candidate is the Pullman Strike of 1894, since Pullman was what thrust Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party onto front stage. The socialists of the fin-de-siècle—Debs, Daniel DeLeon, and "Big Bill" Haywood—still saw themselves as down-home American realists. But a vast amount of the energy which fueled the socialists, the Progressives, and even the New Dealers was the conviction that liberal democracy had failed at promoting a good society because it had mistakenly identified the primary needs of society as political ones, when the real needs were economic and social. Political equality was a sham in the absence of economic equality, and the liberal premise that political equality would foster equal economic access was dismissed as a clever attempt at giving a stone when what was asked for was bread. And with that consciousness, the real history of the American Left begins.
Not that the Left hadn't inadequacies of its own to explain. The most significant of these was the mysterious turn-out of the working classes to fight the European empires' wars in 1914 rather than to stage their own revolutions. This was a mystery which Gramsci and the Frankfurt Schoolers struggled to explain in terms of the success of capitalist cultural hegemony. Perhaps, then, it was not the rising of the workers which would achieve the rise of the Left, but a Leninist vanguard of some other sort. The Old Left had never had much use for vanguards, which usually took the form of intellectuals who had little commonality with the working class. But by the 1950s, the Old Left looked tired and unsuccessful, and so the turn to a new Left vanguard began.
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