The Mind of the Left

John Diggins has written an irritating but provocative book. First, the annoyances: He calls the work a history of the left in the United States but slights everyone but intellectuals. He says almost nothing about the labor movement, but devotes close to a hundred pages to bashing radical academics in the 1980s. He mocks the left’s failure to convert the working class but scorns the Popular Front and contemporary social historians for hyping a tradition of farmers and workers who viewed...