From William Lloyd Garrison to Barry Commoner: why the left's despair over Barack Obama has deep historical roots.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: On political books - American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation - Book review

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

by Michael Kazin

Knopf, 356 pp.

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When Barack Obama was elected president, the American and European left swooned. He had only been in the Oval Office a scant eight months when he won the Nobel Peace Prize. But since then, the euphoria, at least among many of his prominent liberal-left supporters, has curdled into outright despair. Obama has been dinged for abandoning the very principles that animated his campaign. He promised but failed to shutter Guantanamo Bay. He re-signed the Patriot Act. When it comes to taxes, the debt, and a host of other issues, he seems to have let the Republicans take the lead. The candidate who promised change has himself changed, so the indictment goes, and not for the better.

In a new compendious and erudite history of the left, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin does not closely examine the Obama presidency, but he suggests that such despair may just be a constituent part of belonging to the left. Even his title signals caution: dreamers seldom make for the most effective political leaders. And Kazin's is no rosy account of a continual march of progress; rather, it is a careful and nuanced view of the saga of the American left, and one that focuses on the idealistic radicals and progressives from the early nineteenth century down to Barry Commoner and Betty Friedan. For the political junkie as well as those simply curious about the saga of the left, his book is helpfully crammed with numerous informative portraits of famous as well as more neglected figures. (Ever hear of Emma Tenayuca, a young organizer known as "La Pasionaria de Texas" who called for bilingual education and workers' rights in the 1930s?)

This approach can run the risk of becoming a gauzy PBS-type special, but Kazin is rarely less than incisive. He divides his history in three parts--the first focuses on the abolitionist and feminist movements, the second on the rise of the labor unions and socialism, and the third on communism and the New Left. Throughout, Kazin contends that while the left's political accomplishments have been sporadic, its cultural impact has been far more pervasive.

The question haunting Kazin's study is the one first raised by the German scholar Werner Sombart, who famously asked why there was no socialism in America. A conservative, of course, might flip the question around and ask why there should be socialism in America. Either way, America remains something of...