“Contrarianism is a perverse submission to power. It refuses initiative. Playfulness, though, pursues action, not reaction...Why should party-ers have all the fun?” he asks.

Gitlin’s critique of fragmentation and contrarianism is more than philosophical dissent. He laments that while the Left was “hanging loose,” the Right took control. Gitlin saves his harshest admonishments for the right wing conservatives who occupy the highest echelons of power (and did so, says Gitlin, before George W. Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court) and the Naderites who helped boost the current administration.

Gitlin argues that Leftists, perhaps even liberals, are squeamish about winning because they are inherently uncomfortable with centralized power. Moreover, in one of several stabs at the academy of which he is part, Gitlin says that left-leaning individuals are more intent upon debating the “political significance of movies and TV shows” or “marching on the English department.”

Showing his idealist’s stripes, Gitlin writes that in the post-Sept. 11 era, leftist activists will not only have more causes to rally around, but a new paradigm for organizing.

“We have an opening now, free from our ’60s flag anxiety and our automatic no,” he writes. “It is time for a liberal patriotism, robust, unapologetic, and uncowed.”

He believes that this is the moment for the American Left to reclaim its country. But, Gitlin says, in order to reclaim America, the Left must first rescue it from administration officials like Ari Fleischer, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld.

Gitlin’s book was mostly written in the summer and fall of 2002, and perhaps for that reason, does not deal significantly with the war with Iraq or the substantial anti-war protests surrounding it.

Gitlin now says that he sees “something with legs” emerging.

“It’s quite genuinely national, with demonstrations in small towns and little cities, religious elements, polycentric, more than just the skin of the elite universities,” he says. “And it has a dazzling global presence.”

Gitlin sees parallels, both in the peace movement, and in the urgency of the moment, with when he was at Harvard in the early 1960s organizing against nuclear weapons. In those early days, he says, campus activists were exhilarated to fill Lowell Lecture Hall during the Cuban Missile Crisis to talk about nuclear disarmament, even with Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking simultaneously elsewhere on campus.

He and his fellow organizers in a group called TOCSIN were galvanized by apocalyptic concern for the fate of humanity during the height of the Cold War.

But Gitlin—who will return to Harvard at 6 p.m. Monday to speak in the Holyoke Center—says those “nightmare visions” of nuclear annihilation may soon recur.

“Clearly this administration is revolutionary,” he says. “It is understood everywhere in the world as radically reshifting not only the balance of power, but the landscape. And they could do it. They could turn the world upside down. I don’t know if Americans realize how radical this shift is.”

So what’s an activist to do?

“I believe in reasoning back from what we know the world needs to be, for global warming not to overcome [us], for the world not to explode,” Gitlin says. “We need to reason back from these imperatives.”