[In the following review of The Twilight of Common Dreams, Cooper summarizes Gitlin's arguments against identity politics.]

[In The Twilight of Common Dreams,] Todd Gitlin joins a small circle of public intellectuals who have managed to enter onto the battlefields of the contemporary culture wars and not come away spattered by the rancor and righteousness that too often stain debates over culture, identity, and the struggle to define an America on the threshold of a new democratic millennium. He achieves a level of oversight and understanding and, more important, a degree of wisdom in an important analysis of the identity politics that roil the current academic, political, and social scenes. Gitlin's achievement becomes clearer when considering that the lion's share of recent dispatches from the front lines of America's contemporary culture wars rarely avoid the seductions of extreme ideological partisanship.

Gitlin defines identity politics as the impulse “to deduce a position, a tradition, a deep truth, or a way of life from a fact of birth, physiognomy, national origin, sex, or physical disability” (126). He tracks that impulse into several arenas: rancorous debates over high school history books, tedious tit-for-tats over “political correctness,” and, among others, the romance with marginality that turns humanities departments into reservoirs of pent-up grievances. He explores anxious questions raised about national identity throughout an American history marked by successive waves of ethnic immigration. He questions race and ethnicity as vague and clumsy demographic categories; he wonders aloud why so many identity politicians invest so much political will and philosophical faith in such notoriously ambiguous classifications. And he offers a cultural history of the Left in America that culminates in the fault lines of the New Left's recent fragmentation and cannibalization. The Left's tradition of commitment to common ideals that span differences into universal solidarity in service to social justice—the moral engine of participatory democracy—has been sacrificed, according to Gitlin's main axis of argument, to the special interest sectarianism that has spawned identity-based movements and turned the American university into a cloister of monocultures.

The wreckage caused by identity politics, Gitlin concludes, is both intellectual and political. Cowed by postmodern shibboleths that demonize appeals to common truth, the old New Left of “universalist hope”—the Left of the civil rights and antiwar movements—degenerates into the new New Left of separatist rage, with no compelling memory of a unified Left and little feeling for the sort of moral imperative that connects campus politics to the concerns of the wider society. The result, according to Gitlin: “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.” (148).

The myopic cultivation of group difference, Gitlin laments, is ruinous for the Left. And without a vital Left, Gitlin predicts “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 civic solidarities” (230).

The antidote to the hardening of differences into identity factions seems as painfully obvious as it is obviously painful to groups already over-invested in the politics of racial, gender, and ethnic difference: a renewed commitment to commonality. “For too long, too many Americans have busied themselves digging trenches to fortify their cultural borders. … Enough bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences! We ought to be building bridges” (237).