SOURCE: Browning, Frank. “Identity Crisis.” Tikkun 11, no. 5 (September-October 1996): 86-9.

[In the following review, Browning compares Twilight of Common Dreams with William Connolly's The Ethos of Pluralization and finds Gitlin's text less theoretical and less practical in terms of its potential to effect social and political change.]

The time was spring 1969, the place, Paris, a year after “the events of May” when student revolutionaries had seized the streets in renewed calls for liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was my first journey abroad and I was the guest of a generous revolutionnaire I'd met at an American conference the previous winter. Jean-Jacques was a ruddy, round-cheeked fellow, one of the most eager, gregarious fellows I'd ever met—and just married to a dark-eyed, moody art history graduate. Jean-Jacques came from new but big money, and he arranged for me to stay in his parents' posh (Belgian tapestries on the wall) apartment.

“Just tell her you are revolutionnaire and she will sleep with you,” Jean-Jacques assured me the night before I set off for a quick wander to the South of France where he had a student friend. Dutifully/expectantly I took the piece of paper he'd written with his friend's name and number and shoved it in my pocket. I never called the girl, but I kept the crinkled slip of paper for a long time, for it seemed like an odd sort of Comintern card, a certification that I was not an American but a certified citizen of the international revolutionary movement.

In 1969, none of us middle-class kids in fancy universities wanted to embrace Americanism. To be an American was to be ashamed: of our lynching of Black people, of our slaughter of the Indians, of our napalming of Vietnamese children, of the alliance of racist Dixiecrats and Northern plutocrats who ran the government. The American Dream of manicured suburban lawns was a Teflon nightmare where Mom popped Valiums, Dad took long lunches to screw the boss's secretary, and Johnny and Susie were surviving it all only through a little help from their acid friends.

I was Swedish, or English, or Irish, or Dutch, or Canadian—a revolutionary who spoke bad college French but better English than the French did. Anyway, the French people I met, young or old, didn't have much interest in where I was from. They, as always, wanted to know what I thought of France.

We student brigadistas, most of us, fell in love with France for all the same romantic reasons people have fallen in love with France for centuries: food and style and breathlessly beautiful settings complemented by sophisticated cosmopolitan table talk that no one in Akron or St. Louis or even Ann Arbor could pull off.

But there was something else too: We were seduced by the notion of being a revolutionary and loving your country. Generation upon generation of French university students had been taught to embrace revolutionary ideas (though not to toss paving stones) before settling into positions of power and administration. That was (and is) part of the promise and the mystique of La France. Remake, renew, redream the nation, bien sur, but never forget what it means to be French.

Until Vietnam, Americans of the Left as much as the Right articulated a parallel national faith in the American idea. The Left distinguished itself as a movement of universalistic human ideals that were consonant, even reflective, of the broader American ideals: the freeing of all mankind under the guidance of the people's reason. Jefferson and Madison had written it into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Todd Gitlin's greatest contribution in The Twilight of Common Dreams is his history of what happened to the Left's faith in Americanism. Masterfully and elegantly, he traces that history, from its redemptive strains in Emerson—this “asylum of all nations … will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature”—to the Popular Front during the Great Depression.

The language of the Left was the language of a common dream—until the arrival of the Sixties and the birth of the New Left. Always before, the passion of the Left had been a dedication to the future in which the outcasts would come inside and the whole of America, remade, reorganized, renewed, would be richer than any of the parts. After Vietnam it all changed, and the integral symbols of America tarnished into totems of shame, disgust, and embarrassment. “The result,” Gitlin writes, “was that as the war ground on, any lingering New Left belief in a redemptive American dream to be held in common bled away. … From the early nineteenth century onward, nativists and immigrants alike had each proclaimed that they were the real Americans, as opposed to those Others. Now, for the first time in American history, there were groupings who had no stomach to be included, and wanted out.” The New Left no longer wished to be American. We hid our passports and said thank you when we were mistaken for Swedes.

The decline of the American Left and its replacement by a gaggle of self-involved identity movements pitting Blacks against whites, women against men, gays against straights, the faithful against the faithless, Gitlin argues, resulted directly from the New Left's abandonment of its core universalist ideal, the common liberation of all mankind, to be replaced by a shrill, “shapeless melange … of subcultures” where “[i]ntiative, energy, intellectual ingenuity went into the elevation of differences. The very language of commonality came to be perceived by the new movements as a colonialist smothering—an ideology to rationalize white male domination. The time for reunification would come later, so it was said—much later, at some unspecified time.” A movement whose ancestor anthem had once been “we shall be all” was replaced by a factory-stamped T-shirt slogan reading, “It's a [Black, Woman's, Gay, Latino, Redneck] Thing. You wouldn't understand.”

Gitlin, a university man and one of the early leaders of the New Left, brings a moving sense of anguish to his account. His deepest distress comes from the solipsistic babble spewed out by grad student acolytes of French post-structuralism, where the intertextual interactions of discrete subject positions are interrupted by the elisions and erasures of hegemonic encapsulation: It's a deconstructionist thing—you wouldn't understand. Drawing on the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray, and especially Michel Foucault, the partisans of group identity politics have erected an epistemological apparatus (marketed as “perspectivist” or “standpoint” theory) that has granted intellectual and political justification to the partitioning of campus life. Black or Orthodox Jewish students insist on living apart in their own compounds, while lesbians storm out of a gay studies class because a male professor could not possibly understand the lesbian-authored texts he has assigned. To Gitlin, a devotee of the Enlightenment, these developments are doubly upsetting because they are the antithesis of a progressive intellectual tradition even as they have seized control of what passes for leftist discourse in the academy. “But what follows from these categories once they are imposed?” he asks. “Identity is no guide to accuracy, to good judgment or political strategy. Race (or gender, or sexual preference, or disability) is far from an adequate, let alone complete, guide to the world, since all identity is a blindness as well as a way of seeing. A map colored strictly by gender (or race, or religion) does not account for the complexity of the world, does not allow anyone to navigate a society that is, by any definition, multiple, replete with perspectives.” Indeed, as he later points out, “identities overlap within the scope of a single human life.”

It is hard to argue with Gitlin's historical critique and his lament over the state of current discourse. Our vision of ourselves as world revolutionaries was callow and naive; the general denigration of the white working class was strategically idiotic; and the cry for identity solidarity has proven divisive and stultifying. All that said, however, the college student search for new kinds of allegiances did presage another sort of genuinely revolutionary thinking.

We were the first generation to embrace multiple identities and cross-national affiliations outside the maelstrom of migration or the salons of the trust-fund intelligentsia. A mass internationalism that Lenin and Trotsky only fantasized was birthed by jet planes (with youth fares), rock and roll (with tape cassettes), and international fashion marketing (with Levis and Nikes). We could walk the streets of Paris and Amsterdam in shoes and jeans that no longer set us apart, talk Althusser and acid rock, meet and make love (or say we did) with the Viet Cong in Bratislava and believe we were creating a new world where the frontiers of nationalism would be irrelevant.

As more thoughtful analysts have pointed out, we were really the advance guard of global capital, training our palates at solidarity conferences to replace pot roast with pot au feu and Pad Thai. At home, we were withdrawing further and further from any real politics of common cause and progressive change. We had babies and kept them out of public schools. We founded “alternative” newspapers where Yuppie marketing and arts reviews quickly disposed of exposés and radical politics. We bought mortgages and stereos and laptops and joined the Internet and withdrew both from the voting booth and the P.T.A. In short, we recapitulated the very class divisions for which we attacked our parents, and then, guilty over all the groups of people who weren't able to gather up the trinkets and privileges we had, we celebrated their victimhood with the jargon of identity politics, neatly absolving ourselves of much responsibility to change their situation. But is that all?

William Connolly, like Gitlin a veteran of the New Left, suggests not. Also like Gitlin, Connolly takes seriously the tendency toward “centrifugal fragmentation” in contemporary life, the tendency to splinter into smaller and smaller groups of mutual distrust and antagonism. And he is deeply committed to the cause of mutual respect and common action. Unlike Gitlin, however, he finds profound value in the emergence of new group identities and allegiances, and he credits the postmodernists with critical insights that could lead us toward a renewed and reinvigorated democratic process.

What the last quarter-century has shown us, Connolly argues, is the extent of injustice within justice, foreclosure within democracy, gagging within free speech. Buried with the Lockean, Enlightenment formulations of rational democratic discourse is an endless profusion of exclusions, exclusions that rely on a prevailing idea of what is normal. One need only regard the U.S. Constitution: African slaves and women were not, for the purposes of democratic discourse, human: Their concerns, vis à vis each other or vis à vis the white men who owned them, resided beneath the language and functions of justice. Their cultural concerns, rendered as private and personal, either were not the business of politics or were relegated to the males who represented and interpreted them.

Connolly makes the point sharper when he revisits Tocqueville on the terrible fate of the Indians, who, while they were undeserving of their fate, were incapable of being considered as human equals in the social and philosophical world the founders were building. Why? Because, in the Rousseauvian terms of Enlightenment, they as nomads were not civilized: “The Indians occupied but did not possess the land. It is by agriculture that man wins the soil,” Tocqueville wrote. Until he has erected a civilization, he is not civilized; he is beyond the pale. Similarly, an ethos of Christian monotheism provided the cultural glue that enabled Americans to live beside one another and still engage in fierce political debate. Indians, being both “pagan” and often nomadic, challenged the subliminal codes that formed the non-debatable foundation of American life. This is the key to traditional democratic pluralism, Connolly argues: “… politics is free to dance lightly on the surface of life only because everything fundamental is fixed below it.”

At this point, Gitlin and Connolly diverge. Gitlin argues that yes, of course, America has a dreadful history, even a dreadful current practice of excluding and abusing the poor, the Black, the brown, the female, the sexually different. We must stop all that, we must expand the plurality of our debates to bring all groups into the tent of our political life. In contrast, Connolly argues that the challenge for contemporary democracy is to establish an ethos whereby we remake ourselves, rebuild our own political house by extending critical engagement with an endless procession of the uninvited, the unrecognized, the yet unformed visitors to our doorstep. In the contemporary world, where each individual contains multiple identities, it is not enough simply to bring the outsiders inside. We cannot hear the emerging polyglot voices unless we acknowledge the denials and repressions and exclusions in our own story.

The challenge—and here Connolly draws deeply on Foucault—is to excavate the genealogy of our underlying moral and social assumptions: How it is that our “secular” founders relied upon an unstated Judeo-Christian consensus, including particular types of family organization and child-rearing practices, which presupposed certain exclusions of sexual practice, which were rooted in the division of labor, the availability of land, and attitudes toward settlement and nomadic wandering? If we are to inhabit the same nation, town, campus, or classroom amicably, even fruitfully, we will need to know more about how our mutual strengths and frailties have made us seem so strange to each other.

Many, perhaps Gitlin among them, will find this “pluralizing ethos” a fancy cover for old-fashioned moral relativism. But that is a misreading of Connolly's propositions. His object is not to establish neutral equivalences: saving fetuses versus saving the rights of pregnant women, or valuing man-boy love equally with procreative heterosexual marriage. The point is to acknowledge that different assemblies of people have negotiated differing moral codes on each of these issues, resulting in highly regulated rules of conduct.

Human beings can only live together peaceably through the formulation of such codes. But if we are not fundamentalists, if we do not arrogate to ourselves the omniscience of God, we would be wise not to dress the codes we embrace in the cloth of normalcy. The denomination of who is moral and who is not, of who should have a voice and who should not, is a human artifact. We can only examine the story of our choices (say, for example, the reasons why some of our ancestors found it normal to make sodomy and interracial coupling capital offenses) and feel chastened as we negotiate with others the kinds of moral codes we wish to live by.

To a greater degree than we might always acknowledge, that is where the revolutionaries of the Sixties were most effective. As much as multinational marketers may have turned the counterculture into a retail bonanza, as much as the universalist ideals of the Left have given way to balkanized identities, the exchange across old boundaries of nation, language, and geography has taught us that no one can any longer live an insular life with an insular code of morals free of political and moral challenge. One-time Pan-Africanists find themselves demonstrating against the butchery of Nigeria's military dictator. Gay Republican men and liberal lesbian activists find that they are antagonists, not allies, on issues of health care and the minimum wage, even though both make common cause for human rights in Beijing and Moscow. Environmentalists in California fight industrial polluters in Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Boston. In each of these acts, the players drop universalist claims about all mankind for their own group interest, but in doing so something else happens. They relinquish and often dissociate themselves from simple national allegiance and discover the profound cultural differences within their own tribe/movement/group: As homosexual people, they discover that privacy and freedoms do not mean the same thing everywhere; as Black people, they find that personal authority and independence are played out in different ways in different places; as activists they learn that reliance on abstract law versus familial contacts provides a different sense of personal security and opportunity.

Frequently, Connolly admits, he is asked “how much diversity and fragmentation” we can tolerate and still sustain any concept of “the common good.” The problem, he answers, is the question itself, its presumption that the diverse others—gays, women, Latinos, Blacks, disabled, the aged—are simply new limbs drawing strength from the trunk of our historic cultural tree. If, instead, we look within ourselves to find points of interdependence, we might discover that “we” (the white Jews and Christians) are not so much drained or distracted by “them” (say, the mystical Puerto Ricans with their Santaria shrines) as we are both inspired to honor the place of spiritual knowledge alongside empirical science, and, further, by recognizing the differences among ourselves, we may be more ready to leave respectful room for the pagan goddess worshipers and atheists as well. In short, we may come to realize that the experience of being alive is greater than the categories and codes by which we live, that the heuristic models of science and the magical metaphors of religion are merely cages for the spirit that flows above, below, and through them.

Given Bosnia and the orthodoxies of the Farrakhanists and the Kahanists and the Falwellian creationists, what reason do we have to look forward to such a democratic ethos? Here is where Gitlin, the tempered one-time activist of practical politics, might temper his screed and draw on Connolly, the theorist. Without institutions—parties, caucuses, movements, papers, interactive Web sites, and government itself—we never move beyond the arid banter of critical studies. But if we dare to look at the faiths and group identities of others as reflective of our own often-unarticulated yearnings, we may at last discover how to construct a political movement that is porous, elastic, and tough in its commitments, a movement built on mutual generosity and forbearance that recovers the best of the Emersonian vision of ourselves as an “asylum of all nations.”