Todd Gitlin

Gitlin was one of the leaders of the “New Left.”  He was President of the Students for a Democratic Society and a leader of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War.  He spent his entire lifetime as both an activist and an academic.  His writing was clear and always reasoned.

He was a radical all his life, but in the 1990s he began to criticize many leftists for worrying about semantics, multiculturalism, and identity politics when they should have been focused on economic justice.  He wrote, “While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English Department.”

Michael Kazin, former co-editor of Dissent magazine, said “He did rub people the wrong way sometimes, but he had made a transition that others had not, from revolutionary and radical politics to a more practical politics, a sort of left wing of the possible.

I admired Gitlin since I was in my twenties.  He was a role model.  

The quotes are from Gitlin’s obituary in the New York Times.