Thirty years ago, Richard Flacks wrote Making History: The American Left and the American Mind. Flacks had been a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a 1960s leftist activist organization that had folded almost 15 years earlier. He had helped to write SDS's 1962 Port Huron manifesto, a document widely credited with inaugurating the New Left. In my review of Making History for Commentary, I noted that Flacks had maintained his enthusiasm for participatory democracy, the Manifesto's guiding principle. An unabashed optimist, he dismissed the revival of conservatism in the 1980s as a mere symptom of “false consciousness,” the process, according to Marxists, by which the working class is deluded into supporting the ruling class. Flacks called on radicals to resist authority, focus on the everyday lives of Americans, and demand more democracy in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Reflecting the dominance of the American two-party system, he laid out a strategy to capture the Democratic Party and turn it into a progressive stronghold. To those not on the left at the time, it seemed an exercise in futility.
Well, Flacks is back. And, with some justification, he's even more optimistic than before. In Making History Making Blintzes, Flacks, a retired sociology professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, and his wife, Mickey, argue that the selfish, individualistic business ethic of capitalism is in retreat in America and around the Western world. The title is intended to describe how to change society through local organizing and quotidian life, warning that without a focus on how people live, the organizations they create can atrophy or become ends in themselves. Flacks's new book, unlike his earlier one, is frankly autobiographical and hopes to point the way forward by adducing the Flackses' life stories.
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