In a long lamentation about how academic leftists are ill serving leftism, Todd Gitlin, a leftist professor at Columbia University, actually makes some good points about these academics and new ways in which they might approach reality.

For example, after the obligatory derogation of President Bush, America’s Christian roots, the war in Iraq, and so forth, Gittlin suggests that the left engage in the following soul-searching: “the academic left’s ignorance of main currents of American life, their positive tropism for foreign saviors, their reliance on intricate jargon, their commitment to keeping up with post-everything hotshots of “theory” from more advanced continents.” He excoriates one leftist professor for preaching “root-and-branch class-based revolutionism — a variant of the old-time religion” while not critically addressing “Stalinism or Maoism…or the actual Soviet-style policies of that stylish icon, Che Guevara.” Gittlin even admits the hypocrisy of leftist icons Michel Foucault and Edward Said hypocrites, noting disapprovingly “that Foucault supported the Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and Said went silent on Saddam Hussein’s assaults on Iran and the Kurds….” And he concludes that “the academic left is nowhere today.” “[I]ts faith-based [factless, uncritical] politics has crashed and burned. It specializes in detraction. It offers no plausible picture of the world.” That one of the left’s own should so acknowledge its tendentiousness, vacuity and mean-spiritedness constitutes, to my mind, progress.