SOURCE: Cooper, David D. Review of The Twilight of Common Dreams, by Todd Gitlin. Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 4 (summer 1997): 433-34.

In the following review of The Twilight of Common Dreams, Cooper summarizes Gitlin's arguments against identity politics.

[In The Twilight of Common Dreams,] Todd Gitlin joins a small circle of public intellectuals who have managed to enter onto the battlefields of the contemporary culture wars and not come away spattered by the rancor and righteousness that too often stain debates over culture, identity, and the struggle to define an America on the threshold of a new democratic millennium. He achieves a level of oversight and understanding and, more important, a degree of wisdom in an important analysis of the identity politics that roil the current academic, political, and social scenes. Gitlin's achievement becomes clearer when considering that the lion's share of recent dispatches from the front lines of America's...