New Article: “Radical Hero” Todd Gitlin: White Jewish Supremacist Tikvah Useful Idiot
David Shasha
“Radical Hero” Todd Gitlin: White Jewish Supremacist Tikvah Useful Idiot
To be honest, I have never really thought much about SDS Counterculture hero Todd Gitlin until now:
https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/node/33881
Gitlin was, like so many of his Limousine Liberal Counterculture peers, a person who moved freely from the Radical Left into a very comfortable and well-remunerated millionaire career in academia and book publishing:
https://wikispro.com/todd-gitlin-wiki-networth-age/
https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/todd-gitlin
https://www.amazon.com/Todd-Gitlin/e/B001IR3OV6%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Here is an overview of the trend:
https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bourgeois_Bohemian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s#Criticism_and_legacy
https://www.economist.com/1843/2019/11/14/hippie-inc-how-the-counterculture-went-corporate
Indeed, Gitlin is namechecked in the Wikipedia entry, along with the illustrious Robert Bork, as a critic of his own beloved movement:
A Columbia University teaching unit on the counterculture era notes: "Although historians disagree over the influence of the counterculture on American politics and society, most describe the counterculture in similar terms. Virtually all authors—for example, on the right, Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books,1996) and, on the left, Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)—characterize the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Even so, many liberal and leftist historians find constructive elements in it, while those on the right tend not to."
It can be seen in his 2011 article “The Incoherent Left”:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-incoherent-left/
Here is the key Tikvah-friendly passage:
For the sake of ecumenism, it is helpful to see the former Sandinista vice-president Sergio Ramirez acknowledging that his government “many times los[t] a proper perspective of ... what was just and desirable,” that fell into the hands of “power in perpetuity.” But then it is also interesting to see where the editors’ limits lie. They quote Albert Einstein when he opposes the terrorist Menachem Begin in 1948, when he writes compellingly about socialism in 1949, when he co-signs a humanist, anti-cold-war manifesto with Bertrand Russell in 1955, but not during the many occasions when he declared himself a Zionist. It would seem that one single nationalism in the world is not admissible to the editors’ almost-United Nations, though a banal 1997 anti-Oslo Accords statement from an official of the theocratic Hamas is found worthy of inclusion, as is a simple-minded statement in favor of boycotts, divestments, and sanctions against a certain nation whose name must not be spoken.
For those who might not have read what is arguably Philip Roth’s greatest novel American Pastoral, I have discussed the tumultuous upheaval of the Counterculture in the late author’s characteristically Jewish context:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KtEjPfnAF8Gn9N60-cOHo1g1pKVE1cKoa-OJ_OL8fKc/edit
This is how I characterized it:
Merry Levov, a member of the Weather Underground, a radical hippie party of violent college-age children, bombs the small post office in Old Rimrock and forever alters her family’s life.
In contradistinction to Swede’s earlier paean to assimilation he pontificates on Merry’s thoughts of “Amerika”:
How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low – now to her “capitalist dogs.” There wasn’t much difference, and she knew it, between hating America and hating them.
Here we see that Swede’s identity, such that it is, is intimately interconnected to his status in the America that he so believes in. This America is a place where one can “rise” from the bottom and become wealthy and a member of high society. But Merry is unconcerned about such trivialities and is only concerned with who she is as a person. Roth presents this cultural clash as a war of identities, the failure of assimilation against a Jewish past that has now been utterly corrupted. There seems to be no way “back.”
…
It is Merry’s inability to assimilate into a skin not her own that causes the absolute breakdown of the American family in this novel. It is the assumptions of a generation of Jews, the Jewish children of the immigrants who landed at Ellis Island, Jews who in many ways were the ones who populated Roth’s early novels, which have destroyed the American dream. This breakdown is reflected in the tragedy of Old Rimrock and the manner in which the violence of the radical movements of the 1960’s were brought to its doorstep. These radical movements, rather than being seen as purely political in orientation, are now reconceptualized within the context of a politics of identity gone haywire.
This bitter struggle between an older generation of assimilationist Jews and their Counterculture offspring took an important turn when the Neo-Con movement began and the Reaganite Straussians transformed the Jewish landscape and turned the whole thing on its head:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/intellectuals-the-leo-conservatives-a-259860.html
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_1542jsp/
An important figure in this transition is the vile Trumpscum Seditionist David Horowitz:
Former Black Panther Horowitz has gone so far off the Alt-Right deep end that even his longtime ex-Counterculture, Neo-Con allies Ron Radosh and Sol Stern have called him out as a wingnut Trumpwhackjob:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/791kMyKv9Aw/m/wwQo3PP_AAAJ
And then there is the case of another Tikvah Tablet favorite Paul Berman, who has gone the Islamophobic route, much in the post-9/11 manner of ex-Liberals like David Mamet and Bill Maher:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/paul-berman
https://religiondispatches.org/the-polite-islamophobia-of-the-intellectual/
Even the Marxists have gotten into the Berman fray!
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/new-interventions-uk/09.htm
With Berman and Horowitz, we see how the once Radical Left moved to the now Radical Right; which itself is a part of a larger Tikvah trend which Gitlin was comfortably fitted into.
We have known for some time now that he was a favorite of the Whore of Trump:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/todd-gitlin
She has her own crew of Useful Idiot Leftists:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/ishmael-reed
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/shaul-magid
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/daniel-boyarin
These Leftists all fit into the Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacist model that is very much about Troll the Libs and anti-WOKE Cancel Cancel Culture.
As we have seen in the case of anti-Sephardi Occult specialist Shaul Magid, they are welcome to publish Tablet articles so long as they do not cross that Neo-Con line, as was the case with his attack on New Queen of the Jews Dara Horn:
https://religiondispatches.org/savoring-the-haterade-why-jews-love-dara-horns-people-love-dead-jews/
The sealed Tikvah Tablet echo-chamber will allow its Token Libs to be included in the publication’s MISHPOCHEH so long as their writing follows the usual Neo-Con script. If not, they can leave the Zalman Bernstein tent and go elsewhere.
It’s a free country, except if you are Joe Rogan and Spotify!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/K7Zs4QMWhck
Free Speech Grifter and Uncle Tom Sowellian Glenn Loury agrees that only the Right has the right to cancel those it does not agree with:
In this regard, here are two Gitlin Tikvah Tablet articles that could have been written by WOKE Bari Weiss herself:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trigger-warnings-on-campus
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/open-letter-to-incoming-students
Seen in this Zalman Bernstein light, the Gitlin problematic has no better expression than in his “mentor” role with that other Tikvah Tablet Trumpscum Liel Leibovitz:
https://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/2011-07/chosen-peoples-todd-gitlin-and-liel-leibovitz
For those who might not be aware of it, Leibovitz was once enamored of Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish!
The authors consider the views of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to be voices of the unchosen. They indicate the ways in which chosenness moves against the unchosen and begets a counter-chosenness, so that there is an endless contest of chosennesses that is a toxic game without exit, that falls into a mad mode of Manichaeanism.
This descriptive analysis results in no stunning insights, but does yield a hope and an urging that the chosen might act differently with and toward the unchosen. Gitlin and Leibovitz briefly point to the Palestinian poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, who imagines a renunciation of a divine scripted calling, a suggestion that is paralleled by the hope of the Jewish writer Mark Braverman. But the tone of the book by its end is a sad realism that "the cycles of race hatred, revenge, and war cannot be rescinded, erased from memory. History is unsparing." That is as far as the book goes. It is an honest rendition of where we are.
But that was then, and this is now.
What a difference a decade makes!
Leibovitz is today a very ambitious Neo-Con who so very proudly changed sides, as he recently wrote in his very revealing article “The Turn”:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-turn-liel-leibovitz
He used the Whore of Trump podcast to tell us the real Gitlin poop:
https://podcasts.apple.com/kg/podcast/moed-katan-27/id1493757042?i=1000550398384
Setting Leibovitz, perhaps the most pugnacious of all the pugnacious Tikvah Straussian bullies, in this context I can then point to the highly ironic opening of Eric Alterman’s Nation tribute:
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/todd-gitlin-obit/
As he put it there:
I met Todd Gitlin on October 23, 1987. It was the beginning of what would become a decades-long “beautiful friendship.” (We shared a favorite movie in Casablanca.) I can pin down the date because our meeting took place at the ridiculous Second Thoughts conference in which apostate liberals and New Leftists were gathered together to denounce their former selves and embrace the new right. It took place at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington, D.C., and was organized by left-wing Stalinists turned right-wing Stalinists David Horowitz and Peter Collier, with funding from a Christian conservative foundation led by the son of the far-right Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton, together with the Bradley and Olin foundations. Funnily enough, it took place just days after Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra plot was revealed and the largest single drop in the stock market since 1929. These week’s events signaled the long-awaited end to the Reaganite hegemony these folks had gathered to celebrate.
I was just a cub reporter, there for Mother Jones, but Todd was there as a star. He was a former president of Students for a Democratic Society—he succeeded Tom Hayden—as well as the premier chronicler of the movement in his then-recently published masterful-but-critical history, The Sixties. The conference’s hosts badly wanted his endorsement. Todd did them the courtesy of taking them seriously. This was more than these clowns deserved, but it was a principle Todd lived by. A person could come up to him and pick an argument over Antonio Gramsci or Theodor Adorno, and Todd would stop walking and consider what was being said and reply thoughtfully. Speaking from the audience—he and the historian Michael Kazin were writing about the conference together for Tikkun—Todd proceeded to make the kind of subtle distinctions about the New Left’s legacy that literally every speaker at that conference had, for two days, refused to admit. His brief performance impressed me as much with its cool, calm delivery as it did with its erudition.
Indeed, over 24 years ago Gitlin was standing against the Neo-Con Revolutionaries, and by the end of his life he was collaborating with them!
And in this sense, it may reasonably be said that the Left Wing Ashkenazi ethnocentrists are fine with Gitlin’s Tikvah alliance, as Michelle Goldberg explains it in her New York Times tribute:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/opinion/todd-gitlin-liberal.html
In her trenchant words:
I spoke to him many times about the failings of various parts of the left, which became one of his great subjects, but I don’t recall him ever seeming embittered. Some people, disenchanted by the left, make a whole politics out of that disenchantment. But Gitlin’s broad ideals remained consistent, even if his onetime radicalism was chastened by experience. He threw himself into the fight to get universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations. He was excited by Occupy Wall Street and by the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.
The word “Tikvah” never appears in her loving tribute, though there is a strong allusion to his role in the Neo-Con Jewish world in the following passage:
I wish I’d asked Gitlin how it felt to adopt the Howe role in some of his arguments with young leftists, knowing how scornful they can be — how scornful he had been — of tut-tutting elders. To me it seems thankless, but perhaps it was the price of staying engaged.
In so many ways Todd Gitlin has become emblematic of an insufferable elitist Ashkenazi cadre that began with the Vietnam Protests and Free Speech rallies, but ended up part of the Straussian discourse, with its current representatives Leibovitz and Weiss serving up a Trump-friendly stew of Troll the Libs venom.
And they can accurately point to Gitlin as one of their models, as he sought to deploy his Counterculture bona fides in a way that continued to emphatically espouse his White Jewish Privilege and its attendant racism.
It was this Ashkenazi Supremacy with its deep ties to Shtetl ethnocentrism, still common to both Left Wing and Right Wing Ashkenazim, that has affirmed the thesis of Harold Cruse in his classic 1968 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:
In a New York Times article discussing the new edition of the book in 2005, the focus shifted to the book’s purported Anti-Semitism:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/books/review/the-cultural-revolutionary.html
As it states there:
But Cruse reserved special venom for Jews. In "The Crisis," he asserted that "the great brainwashing of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism, or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party." He also cited passages from Dostoyevsky, oddly enough, about how Jewish merchants exploited blacks in the South. When the book was published, reviewers tended to ignore its anti-Semitism. In a recent interview, Mark Naison, a professor of African-American studies at Fordham University, said he didn't think people take Cruse's analysis of black-Jewish relations "very seriously" today, especially not Cruse's dismissal of the role Jews played in the civil rights movement. "It's too ahistorical and too conspiratorial to have much weight outside the sort of anti-Semitic fringe of the black intelligentsia, which is now a fringe, not mainstream," Naison said.
In this sense, it is interesting to see how the great African-American writer Albert Murray was incredibly turned into a disciple of Leo Strauss, the notorious godfather of Jewish Neo-Conservatism, by Tikvah stalwart Aryeh Tepper, insidiously working as a racist Ashkenazi on behalf of the reactionary American Sephardi Federation and its duplicitous HASBARAH ways, designed to suppress the Sephardi critique of Zionism and Ashkenazi racism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KcrIEAbb8bTSUFlrl2ftRMolPzxaLz5jaX7bGecAdYo/edit
Tepper helped to promote an event on the subject, which brought together prominent Ashkenazi and African-American Neo-Cons; which means, pace Cruse, full acceptance of the Right Wing Ashkenazi racist Zionist dogma as a precondition for Black-Jewish relations:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/spotlight/fighting-anti-semitism-through-jazz/
It is interesting to note a parallel tactic used by Tepper’s Tikvah colleague Leora Batnitzky, as she sought to attack the Jewish Post-Modernism and Liberal values of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in order to elevate her own elitist Straussian values:
https://philpapers.org/rec/BATLSA
https://tikvahfund.org/library/podcast-leora-batnitzky-legacy-leo-strauss/
It is in this way that The Tikvah Fund seeks to undermine not only Liberalism and Multiculturalism, but to work in the same malignant spirit as Alt-Right Trumpworld to undermine African-American culture by subsuming it within the White Jewish Supremacy framework, as Harold Cruse insisted was anathema to independent Black voices and ideas.
So, when we look at the WOKE Intersectionality White Jewish Supremacy that has brought together unlikely bedfellows Eric Alterman, Michelle Goldberg, and Liel Leibovitz – under the murderous Tikvah banner – as they heap multitudes of Ashkenazi praise for Todd Gitlin, we can see that Cruse’s concern had its basis in the complexity of Jewish involvement not only in American Communism and the Civil Rights movement, but in the development of the Counterculture and its eventual breakup in the wake of Reaganism and Straussianism.
Gitlin will surely be seen by both Left Wing and Right Wing Ashkenazim as a hero, but in the larger scheme of things he is simply another tool in the racist Tikvah arsenal that seeks to dictate to the rest of us non-Ashkenazim how we should think and what we should be allowed to say.
David Shasha
Requiem for a Liberal Giant
By: Michelle Goldberg
There’s an indelible scene in Todd Gitlin’s 1987 book “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,” in which he and other leaders of Students for a Democratic Society — the leading organization of what was called the New Left — meet with old guard democratic socialists from the journal Dissent. The encounter is worthy of a play; it’s pregnant with both unfulfilled longing for connection and exasperated contempt. “We were scarred, they untouched,” wrote Dissent’s founding editor, Irving Howe. “We bore marks of ‘corrosion and distrust,’ they looked forward to clusterings of fraternity.”
It was the early 1960s (1963, according to Gitlin, 1962, according to Howe). The young activists, with their romantic enthusiasm for revolutions in the developing world, strike the older socialists as feckless and naïve. The socialists seem, to young men who feel themselves on the brink of a radical breakthrough, resigned to their own irrelevance. Gitlin and his comrades even feel a slight disdain for Joseph Buttinger, a Dissent patron and editor who had been a leader of the Austrian Socialist Party and part of the underground anti-Nazi resistance. Through “no fault of his own, history had condemned him to be a loser,” wrote Gitlin. “Not for us elegies to the twilight; for us the celebration of sunrises!”
But there would be no revolution in the U.S., unless you count the right-wing one that would sweep much of the New Deal away. By the end of the 1960s S.D.S. would implode; the giddily nihilistic Weathermen spun off and became terrorists, albeit mostly ineffectual ones. As a 42-year-old — the same age Howe was in 1963 — Gitlin wrote, “I know what it is like, now, to be attacked from my left — how galling when the attacker is 20 years younger, how hard to forge the link between innocence and experience.”
A remarkable thing about Gitlin, who died this weekend at 79, was that he never stopped trying to forge that link. The president of S.D.S. in 1963 and 1964, Gitlin eventually became a renowned professor of sociology. He was also a critic, a novelist and a poet — and, to the end, an activist.
I spoke to him many times about the failings of various parts of the left, which became one of his great subjects, but I don’t recall him ever seeming embittered. Some people, disenchanted by the left, make a whole politics out of that disenchantment. But Gitlin’s broad ideals remained consistent, even if his onetime radicalism was chastened by experience. He threw himself into the fight to get universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations. He was excited by Occupy Wall Street and by the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.
Something I learned from Gitlin and never forgot was that in 1968, when a majority of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam, “the antiwar movement was detested still more — the most hated political group in America, disliked even by most of the people who supported immediate withdrawal.” Now, activists are often unpopular. Martin Luther King Jr. was also viewed unfavorably during much of his lifetime. But there was a cost to needlessly alienating potential allies and fueling right-wing backlash. Gitlin argued for left-wing pragmatism because he wanted the left to succeed, even if some people on the left heard it as patronizing centrism. As he once wrote of Occupy Wall Street, “I worry with this movement, not just about it.”
I wish I’d asked Gitlin how it felt to adopt the Howe role in some of his arguments with young leftists, knowing how scornful they can be — how scornful he had been — of tut-tutting elders. To me it seems thankless, but perhaps it was the price of staying engaged.
In a forthcoming tribute to Gitlin in The Nation, his friend Eric Alterman writes that being at once an activist and an intellectual is harder than it looks: “To be an honest intellectual, as I once heard Susan Sontag — another friend and fan of Todd’s — say, is to make distinctions. To be a successful activist, however, requires the elision of such distinctions in the name of movement unity.” Gitlin had once disparaged those who chose reflection over action; because the Dissent crowd were intellectuals, he and his friends saw them as “inactivists.” But he would learn to combine activism and intellectual rigor, even if that sometimes meant saying things other activists didn’t want to hear. (He’d also join the editorial board of Dissent.)
Gitlin wrote plenty of things I disagree with, sometimes in substance and sometimes just in tone. I don’t like trigger warnings but also don’t like hectoring people who support them not to give in to fragility, as he did in a not-uncharacteristic 2015 essay, “Please Be Disturbed: Triggering Can Be Good for You, Kids.” But Gitlin could push back against what was once called political correctness without ever dipping so much as a toe in Intellectual Dark Web-style reaction. He knew what was important and spent the end of his life working feverishly to rally people on behalf of liberal democracy.
“The Sixties” ends with a quote from Rabbi Tarfon, who lived around the first century A.D.: “It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.” Gitlin never did.
From The New York Times, February 7, 2022
Todd Gitlin Told His Truth Everywhere He Went
By: Eric Alterman
I met Todd Gitlin on October 23, 1987. It was the beginning of what would become a decades-long “beautiful friendship.” (We shared a favorite movie in Casablanca.) I can pin down the date because our meeting took place at the ridiculous Second Thoughts conference in which apostate liberals and New Leftists were gathered together to denounce their former selves and embrace the new right. It took place at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington, D.C., and was organized by left-wing Stalinists turned right-wing Stalinists David Horowitz and Peter Collier, with funding from a Christian conservative foundation led by the son of the far-right Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton, together with the Bradley and Olin foundations. Funnily enough, it took place just days after Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra plot was revealed and the largest single drop in the stock market since 1929. These week’s events signaled the long-awaited end to the Reaganite hegemony these folks had gathered to celebrate.
I was just a cub reporter, there for Mother Jones, but Todd was there as a star. He was a former president of Students for a Democratic Society—he succeeded Tom Hayden—as well as the premier chronicler of the movement in his then-recently published masterful-but-critical history, The Sixties. The conference’s hosts badly wanted his endorsement. Todd did them the courtesy of taking them seriously. This was more than these clowns deserved, but it was a principle Todd lived by. A person could come up to him and pick an argument over Antonio Gramsci or Theodor Adorno, and Todd would stop walking and consider what was being said and reply thoughtfully. Speaking from the audience—he and the historian Michael Kazin were writing about the conference together for Tikkun—Todd proceeded to make the kind of subtle distinctions about the New Left’s legacy that literally every speaker at that conference had, for two days, refused to admit. His brief performance impressed me as much with its cool, calm delivery as it did with its erudition.
For the first few years of our friendship, I played the role of Todd’s student. I’m sure our mutual close friend Kazin recalls the wonderful dinner the three of us shared in 1993, not long before Todd’s 50th birthday at San Francisco’s venerable Fior d’Italia, where Todd explained to us why we should take Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis seriously, based on Todd’s own study of Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, the French Hegelian philosopher upon whom Fukuyama based his much-misunderstood argument. Here again was Todd at his best. He did not dismiss what was widely understood on the left as just another right-wing punditocracy talking point but located Fukuyama’s thesis in the history of thought and its relationship to politics. I have tried to emulate this quality ever since.
Todd was no less devoted to activism and organizing than he was to scholarship. This was harder than it looks. To be an honest intellectual, as I once heard Susan Sontag—another friend and fan of Todd’s—say, is to make distinctions. To be a successful activist, however, requires the elision of such distinctions in the name of movement unity. By the time he died in early February at 79, Todd was the veteran of more movements than most of us can remember hearing of. He spoke at rallies, in classrooms, at dinners, and cocktail parties, just as he published in scholarly sociological publications, on op-ed pages and obscure political websites, in underground zines, student newspapers, and, on occasion, these pages. (During presidential elections, he would auction off private meals to raise money for whoever was the least worst Democratic candidate.) He also wrote books of sociology, history, current events, advice to young activists, as well as poetry and fiction. Yeah, Todd had something to say about almost everything, and, as Kazin told The New York Times, he sometimes made his points rather testily. But in all these venues, he said the same things. He did not bastardize his views depending on the audience. He did not oversimplify. He made critical distinctions at rallies and spoke personally, from his heart, in graduate seminars. Whether the cause was to revive the 1930s’ labor/intellectual alliance, working to pressure his alma mater, Harvard, to divest from fossil fuels, or voicing his opposition to the academic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement aimed at Israel, Todd told his complicated truth everywhere he went. It’s even there in his novels. (I can’t speak to the poetry.) It would have been all but impossible to agree with everything Todd said and wrote, but I submit that it would—or should—have been just as difficult not to respect it.
Todd’s legacy is larger than can be documented here. He deserves to be remembered not only for his writings about the ’60s but also for his pioneering media criticism and his early critique of academic and left-wing identity politics. It was way back in his 1995 book, The Twilight of Common Dreams, that he observed, “While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.” But I would argue that his primary legacy rests in his ability to combine intellectual complexity and honesty with a lifelong commitment to liberal humanist values, applying all of these simultaneously to whatever collective malady we faced at that time. That and his gift for friendship: Bogart was a little off when he said as Rick Blaine that the “problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Little problems mattered to Todd, just as big ones did. And as his friends, admirers, and even his adversaries learned during Todd’s nearly 60 years of activism and argument, you could count on him whenever you wanted answers about either one.
From The Nation, February 8, 2022
The Incoherent Left
By: Todd Gitlin
Once upon a time, in a century far, far away, there was an idea of a single, interconnected left in a single, interconnected world—a unified force, or a vanguard, or a virtual chamber of the deputies of the people, some entity whose mission was to lead the way toward the realization of a collective and universal ideal. In one sense, the origin of this grand metaphor lay in the millenarian monotheism shared by the three Abrahamic religions. In an earthier way, it lay in the seating arrangements of the post-Revolution French Parliament, which positioned the left as the party of the future against the right, which stood for the already done, the established, the past. Just as time was bifurcated into past and future, teetering on the knife-edge of the present, so were the two tendencies.
This was not—there never is—an idea without precedent. The past had been full of struggles for justice and equality. But only occasionally did seers hazard the notion that there was a single, overarching, or undergirding structure to all of them. One attempt to formulate a common root was the couplet attributed to John Ball, the English priest who helped inspire a peasant revolt in 1381: “When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?” (No small inspiration: The 1888 novel A Dream of John Ball was written by a founder of England’s Socialist League, William Morris.) The colonists gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 held it “self-evident” that “all men"—not just white men, Englishmen, propertied men, men of the late 18th century, or denizens of the Northern Hemisphere—are “created equal.”
Then Marx lent the idea a universal and analytical as well as normative sweep—perfect for an age of globalizing production, communication, and culture—with the ingenious proposition that history was passing into the grip of a single, unitary agent of change and deliverance. He borrowed Hegel’s imagery of the “universal class” to posit that history—all of it—tended toward a grand, apocalyptic conclusion in which distinct conflicts would be subsumed into the Final Conflict, to be won when all the oppressed were gathered by inexorable processes into one Big Class to End All Classes.
For roughly a century and a half after Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, the left—or, if you like, Left—was more or less the name for those who honored and heralded that One Big Class. Even a good deal of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism was motivated by the idea that in seeking the independence of their respective nations, hitherto colonized, imperialized peoples were pursuing a universal project—the peoples were willy-nilly a people in the making. The lyrics might vary from place to place, but under the tutelage of One Big Party, the melody would be the same.
Beginning in 1960, the editors of London’s New Left Review began composing the theoretical music for a revised revolution, and they hit their stride as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong strived to conscript the global South into a sort of universal liberation front, and some Westerners fancied themselves its allies. In 1970, the New Left Review spun off a publishing company, Verso, from which now emerges The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad. “Dissent” is the new rubric—a chastened choice in the post-1989 world—but then where shall the editors, Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, draw the line?
The book, an anthology of quotes and excerpts to commemorate Verso’s 40th anniversary, superficially looks like a heap of loose ends, but it is both more and less. Tariq Ali writes in his preface that the figures who appear in the book are the “dissenters and rebels who have attempted to move mountains, to improve, change, transform the world since the earliest times.” But if the category of world-changer is to be so all-welcoming, why not Mussolini, who in his own way “attempted to move mountains, to improve, change, transform the world”? Why honor the black nationalist Robert F. Williams but not the organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? Why toss a credit to the Stalinist hack Louis Althusser for having called Spinoza “the first materialist thinker” (was Democritus chopped liver?).
It’s good to represent the ex-colonial world, but why a Palestinian poet who heralds “the glory lost since Umayyad conquests”? Why reproduce bumper-sticker slogans from groups like the Crips and Bloods, while omitting Albert Camus? Why may kibbutzniks not apply? Why honor the Sartre who declined the Nobel but not the Sartre who for decades defended the State of Israel’s right to exist?
There is plenty of agitprop in this collection, but explanations are wanting for how saints become sinners and what the two might have to do with each other. When does the Mao celebrated in 1927 for declaring, “Down with the local tyrants and evil gentry! All power to the peasant associations!” pass over into the Mao satirized in 1961 as an oppressor of the masses? The editors strain to represent bottom-up rhetoric, however boilerplate, and select cultural snippets (John Lennon at his most banal) alongside high-flying theory. A passage from Foucault, harnessing forces of control to forces of resistance in “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (his italics), is followed two pages on by Adam Michnik celebrating “the end of the utopian dream,” which in turn is followed, five pages on, by a hope for “peace with social justice” expressed by a Peruvian community organizer assassinated by the Maoist Shining Path. Lenin is celebrated; then, poker-faced, a few pages on, so are the rebellious sailors of Kronstadt.
Perhaps the principle is that boilerplate is admissible as long as it is Manichaean, as when Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, speaks of “the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous people, and the culture of death represented by the West. I believe only in the power of the people.” Hugo Chávez makes a show of dispelling the sulfuric fumes left on the United Nations General Assembly rostrum by George W. Bush, and declares “readiness to fight to save the world and build a new and better world.” Seven pages later, the book quotes from an anthem of Iran’s Green Movement, which arose to oppose the “allegedly fraudulent presidential election results” that renewed the tyrannical power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ally of ... Hugo Chávez. Does one big movement enfold Hugo Chávez and the democrats of Tehran?
The Verso Book of Dissent is a project that not only does not cohere, but also cannot. History is too messy to fit a grand story of Establishment vs. Dissent. Does Tristan Tzara, who rants “against action,” who “hate[s] common sense,” really belong to the same One Big Union with Eugene V. Debs who, on the next page, heralds “the rise of the toiling masses”? And what do they have to do with the Internet guru John Perry Barlow, telling “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel” that he comes “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind”? Is it not, to say the least, problematic to tell “the past to leave us alone” in a volume that celebrates tradition?
Often enough, The Verso Book of Dissent resembles the 16th-century Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in which a sort of unity was composed from the premise that what Christians (mainly Protestant) had in common was less what they believed than what was done to them. It was popery that unified the potpourri. Later, it was European empires. And now? “The left” exists in quotation marks.
Lacking coherence, The Verso Book of Dissent heads smack into an intellectual dead end. Nothing unique there: The right suffers its own incoherence. But in a time of ideological decomposition, it would be good to see people so sure of themselves come down from their high horse.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2011
The Chosen Peoples, by Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz
By: Walter Brueggemann
Todd Gitlin of Columbia University and Liel Leibovitz of New York University have written a thoughtful critical volume on the roots and costs of chosenness as it pertains to historical and contemporary Israel and the United States. Their approach is nonpolemical, but their tone implies an important critique of the ideology of chosenness, a summons to do better (that is, repent) and a recognition that supposed chosenness is as much an ordeal as it is a gift. The authors are fully aware of the prerational force of entitlement and privilege that is exercised in the ideology of chosenness.
As a former noncommissioned officer in the Israel Defense Forces, Leibovitz comes at the question of Israel's chosenness from the inside. Gitlin's social location is not indicated, but perhaps his work also reflects a Jewish sensibility. In any case, the authors trace the trajectory of Israel's chosenness from the claims of the Bible to contemporary practice.
The authors recognize that chosenness from the beginning, with Abraham, is an odd claim that "invites incomprehension, skepticism, and obstreperousness" on the part of the chosen, even founding father Abraham himself. In the face of rational wonderment about being chosen, they allow that faith "renders questions of the literal truth of the scriptural stories unnecessary, even petty." But when it comes to the immensity of God and God's intent, faith will not "be obstructed by observed facts."
The defining connection made in the tradition is that the chosen people are linked to chosen land. It is this connection of people and land that produced the messianic impulse of Judaism that is obscured and decentered by traditional rabbinic Judaism. This connection runs from the Bible to the Hasidim, who struggled to recover and restore Judaism. Given the severe pressure for assimilation in Enlightenment Europe, Zionism "erupted from Europe's soil," a reaction that embraced all the components that constituted Jewishness: chosenness, promise and land. It was singularly Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who delivered the impulses of Zionism in the 20th century with his insistence that God and Israel are "eternally unconditionally bound." His work was taken up by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who died in 1982.
It is well known that the roots of Zionism that led to the state of Israel were largely secular. But the messianic brand of chosenness is what has shaped Israeli politics and has produced the zeal for current political determination and defiance. Its result is that "settler certitude outfoxes and outlasts secular uncertainty." The outcome is a "utopian design" held and fostered by the settlers, who believe that any compromise on the land is a compromise of what is most precious and defining.
For all the secular claims of David Ben-Gurion and his trajectory of political leadership, it is messianic Zionism, with its uncompromising position on the chosenness of people and land, that dominates politics and provides the standing ground for the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Many secular politicians have opposed and will continue to oppose such an impulse, but they cannot withstand or defy its force. Gitlin and Leibovitz speak of the "ordeal," the "burden" and the "affliction" of chosenness, but the current "territorial mania" has no patience with such an awareness.
Turning to U.S. chosenness, the authors find a note of theological exceptionalism in the words of some of the first Europeans to come to the America—John Winthrop, John Cotton and the Puritans, who trafficked in evangelical rhetoric that would fuel revolutionary fervor. What strikes one most about this analysis is the way in which U.S. chosenness, like Israel's, is linked to the land. Jefferson, Jackson and Polk, the great expansionists, all appealed to chosenness as a basis for national imagination. Even Jefferson, in his cool deism, found such rhetoric useful for mobilizing energy for his expansionist impulse.
The authors suggest a straight line of influence from the Puritans to the aggressiveness of Theodore Roosevelt, the missionary zeal of Woodrow Wilson and eventually the eager reach of George W. Bush, all of which attached American greatness to a grasp for more land under the guise of advancing democracy. This propensity has had from the outset a conscious component of Manifest Destiny, and it has culminated in a U.S. imperialism that is shaped by racism, in which the white race is destined to govern for and on behalf of the less competent of other races. This material is not unlike that presented by Bruce Feiler in America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story, only here the aggressiveness is more accented and the authors imply a critique of uncritical chosenness.
This nearly Manichaean sense of chosenness has been interrupted in U.S. history only rarely, by such voices as William Jennings Bryan, William James and Mark Twain. It was especially called into question by the ironic sense of Abraham Lincoln, here singled out for his phrase "almost chosen people." Lincoln would not give in to the ideology of chosenness. As the authors draw a line from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush, they dare to entertain also the possibility of a line that runs from Lincoln to Barack Obama, a line that is promised but surely not very visible or reliable. In sum, the messianic claim to the land is as deeply embedded in the ideology of the United States as it is in the passion of Israel.
Finally, in a nearly meditative tone, the authors ponder the unchosen and consider the deep tension between "the West" (with the U.S. as a stand-in) and Muslims. They present the Israeli-Palestinian contestation over the land as a contest between humiliation and vengeance, with the humiliators never understanding that they evoke the vengeance.
The conflict between the chosen and the unchosen is, of course, ongoing:
The drama of a single chosen people colliding with pretenders and unsalvageables haunts the story of bloody encounters from the Crusades to the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, from Little Big Horn to the Yom Kippur War, from Wounded Knee to Hebron. . . . The chosen and the unchosen are entangled together by resentment and resignation, mercy and anger, humor and heartbreak, cacophony and harmony. The relationship between the chosen people and those whom they dispossess . . . is partly an extended war dance, but it is also a sequence of movements, sometimes slow, sometimes stormy, in which the vanquished, while never triumphant, nonetheless help determine the rhythm of history.
The authors consider the views of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to be voices of the unchosen. They indicate the ways in which chosenness moves against the unchosen and begets a counter-chosenness, so that there is an endless contest of chosennesses that is a toxic game without exit, that falls into a mad mode of Manichaeanism.
This descriptive analysis results in no stunning insights, but does yield a hope and an urging that the chosen might act differently with and toward the unchosen. Gitlin and Leibovitz briefly point to the Palestinian poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, who imagines a renunciation of a divine scripted calling, a suggestion that is paralleled by the hope of the Jewish writer Mark Braverman. But the tone of the book by its end is a sad realism that "the cycles of race hatred, revenge, and war cannot be rescinded, erased from memory. History is unsparing." That is as far as the book goes. It is an honest rendition of where we are.
A third element of the enigma of chosenness lies beyond the horizon of these authors but surely belongs in our consideration, for one cannot get from the chosenness of Israel to the chosenness of the United States except by way of the chosenness of the church. It is certain that the church regards itself as the most recently chosen people of God—chosen for mission, but chosen nonetheless. And that chosenness has produced claims of "no salvation outside the church," with all the power and leverage that such a claim has historically carried.
Thus as we reconsider chosenness, I suggest that the church cannot get a pass on the problem. And if the church cannot, then there may be reconsiderations about the claim for the chosenness of Jesus as the sole Messiah—a claim that is deep within our Christian confession, which I gladly confess, but one that is exceedingly difficult for many faithful people in a world of good-faith neighbors. We do not know our way forward on such profound challenges, even as we do not know how the chosenness of Israel or the United States can be revisioned in a world that cries out for justice and peace.
At the very edge of the Hebrew Bible is this astonishing oracle of promise in Isaiah: "On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, . . . whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage'" (Isa. 19:24–25). The oracle dares to list God's pet names for chosen Israel and then freely distribute them across the landscape, even to Israel's enemies. The message of such poetic imagination is that God has many chosen peoples. It is to be "on that day." We may now wonder, when these several chosennesses have reached their lethal limit, how soon that day may be. It is a day that requires relinquishments of a daring, obedient kind.
From The Christian Century, August 4, 2011