ABSTRACT
This chapter offers textual analysis of Dissent debates about the relationship between intellectuals and America. These discussions center on the Sixties’ trope “The Masses.” Featured themes are “Where is the New Left,” (Gitlin, Irving Kristol, Joseph Epstein, Michael Walzer, Lewis Coser, Russell Jacoby, Howe, David Lehman, etc.); “The Left and the Fable of Marketopia,” (Terence Ball, Dennis Wrong, Richard Lowenthal, John Summers, etc.); and “Jaytaling: Where is the Left Criticism,” along with the relevant narrative “The Left Marching on the Academy,” (Berman, Gitlin, John Patrick Diggins, Ellen Willis, Andrew Delbanco, Lewis Coser, Jacoby, Bromwich, etc.). Reflecting on their own cultural criticism, especially compared with that of the Right, the Dissent writers come to conclude, alarmingly, that they suffer from a lack of effective language to maintain their place in mainstream intellectual life. At such a point, what seems most urgent for the left intellectual is to abandon the trite language of political correctness. These intellectuals need to create new narratives that address more general problems, larger issues, and most important of all, reach a larger audience. They need, perhaps, to return to the accessible vernacular that they had used in the 1960s.
