SOURCE: Alter, Jonathan. Review of The Twilight of Common Dreams, by Todd Gitlin. Washington Monthly 28, nos. 1-2 (January-February 1996): 55.

In the following review, Alter discusses the excesses associated with radical multiculturalism and how such excess contributes to the decline of the Left's power.

My idea of hell on earth would be life as a lefty professor at Berkeley in the 1980s and early 1990s. A conservative could oppose the politically correct idiocy, but as a liberal professor I would have felt obligated to uphold the basic values of my creed, while quietly enduring the most appalling manifestations of multiculturalism. Some of that is receding now—the demands to spell “women” as “womyn” seem a tad off the point—but for a while, it was bad.

Todd Gitlin, a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of books on the 1960s and the media, has...