Intellectuals and the Flags [Paperback]

For many Americans, the shock and horror of 9/11 dissipated within months, driven into the subconscious, replaced by the old trench thinking and its accompanying political combat. Some even enlisted the atrocity as a bogus rational for waging a senseless, immoral war in Iraq. Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s radical and president of Students for Democratic Society, today an esteemed professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, put the horror to better use.

Living just north of the World Trade Center, inhaling the acrid air containing the remains of the fallen buildings -- New Yorkers would eventually realize that the foul air also contained human remains -- Gitlin set about to rethink his political ideas and reassess how to revitalize the left. That is what tragedies should do: overwhelming grief should lead to serious rethinking. Instead of simply escaping the pain or worse exploiting the horror, Gitlin challenged the orthodoxies. What being patriotic means? What patriotism means for liberals? Is U.S. military intervention always bad? What is good about America? The result is his engaging, and courageous The Intellectuals and the Flag.

"This might," the 1960s icon writes in the introduction, "be a healthy time for an intellectual renaissance. The nation is deeply troubled, and for all cant about optimism and faith, much of the nation knows it is troubled."

An intellectual renaissance on the left is not going to be easy, Gitlin makes clear. The political left is essentially bankrupt; Marxism and postmodernism are exhausted. A right-wing coalition of plutocrats and fundamentalist Christians has controlled the politics of the nation for three decades.

In a previous book, Letters to a Young Activist (2003), Gitlin laid out what practical efforts liberals needed to undertake to regain political superiority. The Intellectuals and the Flag places an intellectual foundation under those practical efforts. The objective of the book, the author writes, is "to contribute to a new start for intellectual life on the left."

In this timely and lucidly written book, the professor begins with a survey of three intellectuals who in the 1950s were his personal models: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Then he examines the negative effects of postmodern thinking, the anti-political of Cultural Studies, and the values of media, citizenship, and higher education. The final section, the title essay, "The Flag and the Flag," is where Gitlin explores what most readers are most interested in: how did we get into this political mess?

"The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide."

The left played a major role in ending the Vietnam War, but it also paid a heavy price. Immersed in the horror of Vietnam, day after day, year after year, too many of us developed an unbalanced, lopsided view of our country. We acquired an overly negative evaluation of America.

"But the hatred of a bad war, in what was evidently a pattern of bad wars -- though none so bad as Vietnam -- turned us inside out. It inflamed our hearts. You can hate your country in such a way that the hatred becomes fundamental."

In the wake of the Vietnam War, political leftists tended to immerse themselves in either radical individualism -- often devoid of politics -- or cosmopolitanism with a global perspective. This, it seems to me, left an opening on the national level that the right-wing, beginning during the era of Ronald Reagan, exploited successfully.

To return to political prominence, Gitlin stresses the left must end its knee-jerk slamming of America. It must stop being a mirror opposite of the right-wing that views America as always righteous. We need a patriotic left that "stands between Cheney and Chomsky," he quotes Michael Tomasky. We need to love our country, but love it for what we value. We need a liberal patriotism, not the right's patriotism of closed-minded obedience, not their patriotism of only symbolism, but patriotism that is open-minded and action oriented. And that means we need to be open to what in the past we automatically rejected.

"Post-Vietnam liberals have an opening now, freed of our sixties flag anxiety and our automatic rejection of the use of force. To live out a democratic pride, not a slavish surrogate, we badly need liberal patriotism, robust and uncowed."

Now is the time for liberals to reconnect with their nation, to celebrate its ideals while continuing to criticize its shortcomings, a liberal patriotism that says we will make sacrifices for our country because we love what is good about America.

"It is time for the patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays, not catechisms or self-congratulations. It is time to diminish the gap between the nation we love and the justice we also love. It is time for the real America to stand up."

And so Todd Gitlin, a major antiwar voice during the Vietnam War, an insightful and broadminded writer during Bush's Iraq War, calls upon the American left to embrace their country to make it the reality that we want America to be. If you are tired of a left politics assigned to the political margin, if you are tired of the status quo that paved the wave for George Bush and the Iraq War, buy this book. And then get to work.

This thoughtful work made me ponder the use of the American flag, as well as how various Americans regard patriotism.

It occurs to me that at least on social issues, patriotism is naturally the domain of the liberals. After all, we liberals are the ones who focus on the common good. It is the conservatives who are more willing to be exclusive or even intolerant, shutting out part of our own society. It is the conservatives who are more willing to assign profits to themselves even at some cost to the greater good. It is the conservatives who boast about our Right to get tax breaks. We liberals are the ones who want to collect more taxes in order to improve our society.

Yes, we liberals are the ones who ought to be waving that flag around. We're the patriots. And sometimes, when we focus on social issues, we do just that, to the annoyance of those who disagree with us.

When it comes to foreign policy, it appears to work the other way around. Now, we liberals are the ones who can threaten to hurt our country in order to work for what we claim is the common good of the world. And it is conservatives who are suddenly willing to spend tax money ... on defense. And it is they who wave that flag, not us.

Overall, however, we liberals are the ones who are more leery of our own flag. Why is that? Are we ashamed of our country? As Todd Gitlin explains, sometimes we are. We've seen America behave badly at times. And we aren't so sure we want America's misdeeds to be in our name.

But Gitlin goes further than this. He discusses the two main problems liberals often have with patriotism. The first is individualism. We Americans love freedom. We liberals often view ourselves as loving freedom even more than others. We love freedom so much that we hesitate to give up some of that freedom to support (and follow the orders of) any government, even our own.

Of course, if we are unwilling to defend those freedoms, we'll lose them. If we are willing to defend our freedoms, we may need to join an army (or at least be patriotic in some manner) which restricts those freedoms. However, if we truly love freedom, we need to put up with these restrictions or we'll be unable to find a way to defend our country when it is attacked.

In any case, we liberals are scared to see unthinking support of all American policies. We don't want genuine deliberation spoiled by unreflective flag-waving. And that makes us hesitate to wave that flag.

The second problem is cosmopolitanism. Flag-waving just plain looks provincial to us. It makes us look unpopular to the community we really feel we belong in, namely international society. And it makes us appear intolerant and uncooperative.

Still, there is a serious problem that we liberals face. Gitlin sums it up by explaining that many on the left simply settle for condemning what we're doing, rather than coming up with plans for improvement. And that leaves many of us without a positive program to espouse.

Sure, we want to present an alternative to those appear to us to be "faith-based, inclined to be impervious toward evidence, and tilted toward moral absolutism." But as the author shows, quite a few of us on the left appear to be just as faith-based, impervious to evidence, and tilted toward moral absolutism as the extremists on the far right. What we really need is an alternative to both of these extremes. And those who always condemn America but refuse to condemn fanatical terrorists are not providing us with that alternative.

Ideally, we want to come up with an intelligent and positive program that will improve society. And we want to remove some counterproductive ideas from our platforms. Of course, if we fail to do that, we'll probably alarm so many voters that we won't be given the opportunity to accomplish anything, whether it is of value or not.

I recommend this book.

A problem with political parties that have an agenda to promote is that if they are successful then the party begins to flounder about aimlessly with no goal but to complain about the world situation. The Democratic party, and particularly the left wing of the party had a series of items on its agenda: There was civil rights, woman's rights, the war in Viet Nam, the Great Society view of welfare, gun control.

Civil rights led to the legislation that greatly expanded the rights of blacks to vote, ended 'official' school segregation and basically changed the structure in the south.

Woman's rights were basically accomplished by court action in cases such as Roe v. Wade.

The Viet Nam war is over. And while the left seriously opposes the war in Iraq, people are not being drafted and there is little agitation on campuses around the country.

The programs for supporting the poor have fallen into disrepute as we have spawned generations of 'welfare queens' that have lived on the system but not used it as a way to break the poverty chains.

Gun control has become an issue of the left wing of the party, but when Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee and the polls said gun control was the primary reason, the mainstream of the party realized that strong gun control would keep them out of office. When Kerry and Edwards returned to Washington from the campaign trail to vote on a bill that annoyed gun owners they protected the liberal base of their party, but they wrote off the south and west and lost.

It seems that the Democratic party has become the party of complaining about the actions of the Republicans without having an agenda of their own. When President Bush announced his vision of changing social security by allowing a portion to be invested at the direction of the payer the Democratic party began a campaign to denounce Bush's plan. But did anyone ever hear what the Democrats proposed to solve the problems of an aging population?

In this book Mr. Gitlin calls on the left to once again engage the public life with vision, patriotism, and a willingness to look at the world as it really is rather than spending all their time criticizing and resisting Bush. After all, this is Bush's last term, he is leaving office with rather low approval ratings. Is the next election to be another Republican victory because the Democrats are unable to present a vision that the populace wants?