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The agony of the American left

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This is Christopher Lasch not at his best, but close. His argumentation is, as always, strong and applicable to the age at hand. His best works are Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites. The American Left has suffered since the end of World War II despite the relative successes of the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

This book, a compilation of five essays by Lasch, draws upon the author's contemporary setting for its sense of urgency in addressing the defeats and comebacks of the American Left since the turn of the twentieth century. Rife with political upheaval, uncertainty, and violence, the mid to late 1960s provided the author both a launching pad and a target for his argument that, in the twentieth century, leftists lost the type of discipline which only sound theoretical grounding can supply. The resulting gap within critiques of middle-class capitalist society rendered radical contestation toothless and, even worse, visionless--particularly in the context of liberal acquiescence to the Cold War's anti-communist fervor. This combination--loss of theory and overt capitalist hegemony after the war--made the generation of political and social alternatives all the more difficult. And, lamented Lasch, it "made it difficult to get a political education in the fifties." This, he wrote, "is the immediate source of our troubles" (p. viii). To look more deeply than the immediate problems, Lasch studied the early twentieth century for patterns of upsurge and disintegration in mass radical movements. Still, the question driving his inquiry--Why has radicalism recorded no "great triumphs"?--received its fuel from Lasch's desire to mend the ways of the Left in his own time and for his successors.