Left for Dead.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

by Michael Tomasky Free Press. 240 pages. $23.00.

There are books that a reviewer feels condemned, rather than assigned, to read, books so intensely irritating that the reviewer has to wonder what she has done to earn the pitiless enmity of the editors who assigned it. "Where did I go wrong?" is of course the question the book itself wants me to dwell on, because Michael Tomasky's thesis is that the left has willfully screwed up, and it has screwed up largely because of people like me.

At least I think "like me." Tomasky's left--the bad, screw-up left--will not be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever joined a union picket line, or sat at a sidewalk table to register voters, or campaigned against the local toxic waste dump.

His thesis is that, sometime in the last twenty years, "the left" abandoned the straightforward issues of economics and democratic rights that appeal to the white middle class in order to concentrate, perversely, on a sterile PC-ness that is offensive to white people generally and probably also to the black middle class. While the American majority longed for someone to speak forthrightly about issues like failing wages and campaign reform, we were indulging ourselves in an orgy of identity-based self-righteousness and craven pandering to same.

Now obviously the truth of this depends on how you define "the left," and I should admit right off to defining it in a way that automatically fends off much of Tomasky's criticism. As he quotes me (approvingly) from an essay on the limits of multiculturalism, "the left isn't multi-anything ... [It] has to be an attempt to find, in the rich diversity of the human world, some point of moral unity that brings us all together."

From my point of view, the type of person who, for example, disrupts a progressive conference because of some microscopic slight to women, or gay people, or people of color--and I have seen this happen all too often--is not "left": maybe a potential constituent for the left, if that hyper-refined sensitivity to injustice could be directed toward an actual real-world problem, but, for now, a PC brat.

But if my definition is overly selective, so, in the opposite way, is Tomasky's. You will not find, in Left for Dead, such groups Citizens for Tax Justice, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Wider Opportunities for Women, the New Party, Acorn, Democratic Socialists of America, or a host of other organizations focused, for the most part, on the kind of issues that Tomasky approves of. Instead, he goes after a straw man stuffed with bits and pieces of post-modernism, black nationalism, and militant identity politics. This is a "left," previously unknown to me, that made a cause" out of defending Ben Chavis from sexual-harassment charges, that militantly opposes transracial adoptions, and to which "quality of life" is a "dirty phrase."

It takes a...