Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America.

• Author: Dallek, Matthew

In October 1992 Michael Tomasky, then a "card-carrying representative of the Village Voice," interviewed Newt Gingrich about the Georgia representative's political future. I'd like to be Speaker of the House, Gingrich told his interviewer, and I think I can do it within six years. Fat chance, Tomasky thought.

Just over two years later, the unthinkable occurred: Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in four decades and Gingrich, the firebreathing conservative, became Speaker of the House of Representatives. "Where have we gone wrong?" Tomasky, now a columnist at New York magazine, wondered. Why has the left "completely lost touch with the regular needs of regular Americans?" The answers, Tomasky writes in Left for Dead, lie largely in the multicultural politics, that dominate the current left-wing agenda. Around 1970 American radicals began to forge new political alliances based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Abandoning the more traditional, classbased politics of the union movement and the universalist ethos of the civil rights struggle, the left splintered into a wide array of racial and gender groups that seemed more interested in railing against "racist power structures" than in developing serious solutions to national economic and social ills.

The results, Tomasky argues, have been disastrous. Today radical feminists lead crusades against pornography, black activists inveigh against white racists, student radicals write rules banning hate speech on campus, and some gay and lesbian groups have asserted their equal rights by storming St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and exposing themselves on Fifth Avenue. The agendas, Tomasky argues, are narrow-minded, divisive, and irrelevant to the bulk of the American public. Relatively small in number, today's multiculturalists are so enfeebled that they have to rely on the courts to "impose solutions that lack broad public support." And if you don't support the official party line? You're "branded," Tomasky writes like someone who knows, "as an enemy of progress."

So how can the left resurrect itself? To answer that question, Tomasky examines four issues--welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care--on which the left is particularly weak. In each case, he makes clear that the left is bereft of ideas--interested primarily in expanding current programs while rejecting most attempts at reform. Instead of conceding, for example, that illegal...