Among the curses of possessing a mind filled with the detritus of old books and movies is the discovery that one hungers for a life stripped down to its bare essentials. At 62, a man can acknowledge that he is tired of watching and rumination. I want to trust what I see and feel the way I did as a child. In a world so singular, that is all I can finally ask for from both books and movies. Forget reflection. All that is left for a man like me to argue over is how he can measure the value of what he has learned in his life until now.

In my case, memory commands that I begin by admitting to how political a creature I have always been. "And will remain!" my inner man whispers. Not a pleasant reminder in a nation besieged by the incessant chorus of the rich and powerful urging us to get government "off our backs." Yet the remnants of past ambition nod in assent. Maybe the lessons of love and war are temporary, but the lessons of a man's political passions seem curiously permanent. Politics anchor my past, as if everything I once believed in were unalterable. Don't bother telling me that the lessons aren't really permanent. I know that. Yet they stain me now and they will stain me in the future, a scar of the personal past. Beyond logic and reason, politics remind a man of who he is and to what he owes his allegiance.

"Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit," writes Montaigne. Rarely do I question those who are truly great. And I am cautious in the arguments I frame even in imagination against a writer like Montaigne. But I'll risk a dissenting note here. As I grow older, my politics seem cast like a fish net across the life I review. Belief is not merely a reflection of a man's failed ambition. What Shakespeare's Marc Anthony says of dead Caesar remains true for the rest of us, too. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Memory already is.

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The most troublesome of all the political lessons I learned when I was young is that the politics of the heart and the politics of the head are in a state of perpetual war. The heart may call the tune in the beginning, but sooner or later it will meet with resistance. Questions are asked, demands made. When it comes to how a man lives and what he lives for, the heart and head slash away at each other like verbal duelists. "What is to be done?" asked Lenin. Another shot heard round the world. Only Lenin spoke from his head when he should have spoken from his heart. Before the question was out of his mouth, a terrified world quaked in anticipation of upheavals to come. Those invited to the revolution already knew they would have to serve as their own primary-care physicians.

Maybe that's why my head tells me that Orwell was wrong when he insisted all writing is political. My heart, on the other hand, tells me he was right to assume that one has no choice but to accept words as the proper response to questions of politics—which didn't stop Orwell from going to Spain to fight with the anarchist P.O.U.M. Twenty-two when I read Homage to Catalonia, I wept like a boy whose cap pistol has been stolen. One more soldier of the revolution that never came, I still prayed then for the politics of the heart to make sense. Orwell understood that all true political questions are answered by words, not bullets. Writers, even those who as children dreamed of being in the vanguard of the revolution, become the words they use—a truth that eluded Orwell's contemporaries, as it eluded me in the 60's and 70's. That Maoist claptrap still clings to memory, a fungus shriveled into the thin air of history—for better or worse, a legacy of a world I never knew.

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From the age of 17 on, I thought of myself as what the French call an homme de gauche (it sounds better than "man of the left"). I no longer attempt to distinguish between "liberal" and "left" today, for the times are difficult for us all. It's enough to admit that I was a willing recruit in the egalitarian ranks. So why do I feel embarrassed to recall the late 1960's, a supposedly good time for the left in America? Is it because I am watching a movie in my mind, where Karl Liebknecht still rapturously cries out, "We are at the gates of heaven!" In 1969, the future was kissed by pastel posters—slogans, flowers growing out of gun barrels, words to live by. Reality had not yet cooled me out, but I understood even then that the Buddha of The Little Red Book was no Liebknecht. Bullets came from guns. Yet the power Mao hungered after came from words alone.

For it was words that described a man's passions and fears, words with which he would create all the brave new worlds. Forget gun barrels! Forget those sybaritic flower children blowing themselves into patches of flesh and bone in that brownstone on Eleventh Street, their minds as shredded as the American Express credit card discovered in the rubble. Were those children of the revolution that never came blown away by a home-made bomb alone? Or did they die from an excess of devotion to the abstract gods of revolution? Think of intellect issuing commands to spirit, like a top sergeant barking orders to raw recruits. What those Ivy League innocents didn't know was that words are the reality behind bullets, not the noisy blanks of middle-class collegians seeking adventure.

Such knowledge should have comforted me. But it didn't. To be on the left in the chaotic America of the late 60's and early 70's—with its protests against the war in Viet Nam, its civil rights struggle, its sexuality flowing like an endless beer keg at a fraternity party—was to recognize the extraordinary power of words. How else could I view what politics had wrought than as a pledge to the potential power of language? Political people believed in words because words, not bullets, were what they used to persuade others of the justice of their cause.

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Words were the most effective tool the left possessed in the 1970's. Yet in 1995, that same left is having its brains beaten out—and by words, not bullets. On the playing fields it once owned, the words have been turned against it. Not only does conservatism now possess the money and impetus, it now possesses the words also. Wherever one looks, the left is on the defensive, its sense of mission broken, its remedies for what ails this nation contemptuously dismissed. Like it or not, the conservative vision has seized America's young. It is to the right, not to the left, that they have been moving over the past 20 years.

Yet I continue to think of myself as part of what Rush Limbaugh loves to berate as "the liberal left." Not that I mind being targeted by Rush. In itself, that flatters me. My problem is that I am no longer sure of exactly what is left or liberal about my politics. I am surprised at the extent to which those of us who identify with the left have surrendered the idea of a just society. In 1969, the dominant issue facing us was the quest for social and economic justice. The American left had less to do with questions of "life-style" than with questions of who owed what to whom. Even the Marxists among us didn't take the idea of history's "new man" seriously. They hadn't taken it seriously since the 1930's, when the left in America learned to pride itself on its pragmatism. It was the gates of Ford's River Rouge plant, not the gates of heaven, that it had stormed successfully. Clear and simple objectives—higher wages, vacations, medical insurance, protection against layoffs—rarely inspire heavenly visions.

Such limited objectives succeeded, for they made the average man's life better—at least until the left opted for "life style politics" over mundane bread-and-butter issues. A touch-feelie smog enveloped the American left at the same time that conservatives—from Bill Buckley's National Review cold-war warriors to William Kristol's educated servants of power—threw their energies into questioning the direction in which American culture and society seemed headed. For the past three decades, conservatives have been working at formulating a coherent philosophy and a consistent world view. The right has pushed its agenda with a vigor that commands respect, even as the focus of the left has grown soft and hazy. In its effort to be all things to all men, liberalism began to shrivel into Pogo's enemy, "Us!"

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Despite the power and money conservatives possess, the failure to articulate a vision of what America should be is what lies at the heart of the left's demise. Beyond images of flowers growing from gun barrels and such nostrums as "Stop the Hate!" chalked on city sidewalks, do we on the left have a clear idea of the kind of society we want? It's easy to dismiss Bill Bennett's list of virtues with a well-aimed quip or two. Only if that were effective politics, Mort Sahl would be president and The New Yorker would be making money. An effective political agenda should offer more than a Chinese menu of possibilities. It's not enough to choose the "Green Revolution" from Column A, a dash of flagellation from Column B, and the "life style choice of the day" from Column C. Taste and morality are not synonymous—and if the left is serious, it should question how we live and what we live for. And it should begin by distinguishing right from wrong.

The shrinking appeal of the left for America's young can be seen in any number of ways. Few make me as uncomfortable as this: almost everyone I know who reads The Nation is close to the age of its new owner, Paul Newman. And he is now 70. Yet I know people in their twenties and thirties who read The National Review. That bothers me, even as I remind myself that personal observation is not proof. I don't care that it's not proof. It still makes this middle-aged homme de gauche very uncomfortable.

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Let me admit to my increasingly ambiguous relationship to that liberalism the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen liked to speak of as a flower in need of constant watering. I'm not altogether happy with a philosophy that now seems as much an itch that chafes as enlightened idealism. What right-wing talk show hosts claim we want has more truth to it than those of us on the left want to admit. Liberals are sanctimonious and often given over to an excessive weighing of all sides of all issues. We are frequently unwilling to take the blame for our failures or to face the actual lives of the underclass we defend, often unquestioningly. And our politics are less than realistic in the goals they demand and less than honest in the methods they sometimes employ.

Even well-watered flowers can smell of the fleshpots of Egypt as they decay. "Life-style" issues seem removed from the rational pragmatism of the left's past in this country. Our childish petulance tones the claims we insist upon, even as our sense of what America is grows overbearing and our adherence to the examples of the past lacks conviction. Is it any wonder that I find myself reminded of the American left when I read Yeats' famous line, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity?"

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For me, politics are as personal as a kiss. And because it is mypolitics I am speaking of, I can admit to doubts about the future of liberalism. Like old love affairs, political positions sooner or later fuse with time. "This is no country for old men," wrote Yeats, trying to purge himself of a mundane world and enter the realm of pure spirit. Age tempts all of us to measure the past as if it alone defined the soul's hunger. Even those of us who deny the soul an existence want the comfort of ideas that possess staying power. In politics, again as in love, no loss is greater than winning — for victory destroys the anticipation of fulfillment.

Yet even personal confession must accept politics that exist not for eternity but for the moment. The truth is that I was never quite as radical as I pretended. The left may brag of how pragmatic it is, but how many of its demands even in the halcyon days of the late 60's were mere variations on its age-old curse of absolutism? Time and again, it was the dictates of faith we were asked to accept, as if the heart could struggle against perceived reality. Yet there is pain even to what is observed. In the last analysis, political salvation is as personal as religious salvation. Like the churchgoing Irish grandmothers I remember from my childhood, I was ready to give body and soul for a peek at heaven's gates.

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Long before the ascension of Newt & Co., I already suspected that I was a political anomaly. Now I suspect I may be destined to remain a political anomaly forever. If a man's politics could be given body, think of me as a large, ungainly creature, a big and powerful dray horse, uncertain of which way it can move. As I stand at the center of my own doubt, I paw the ground, afraid to roam the woods not because of what I may find there but because of what I may not find. Maybe it's not as delicate an image as a flower in need of watering, but in a nation where the left seems willing to embrace any idiocy deemed politically correct, it's root, grunt, and hold on for dear life for all of us political anomalies.

And who can deny that we on the left are a sorry lot at this time—battered, almost broken, unsure of our cause, forced to question our deepest convictions? We can't even seek refuge from our bleak prospects by claiming to be alien to this America. Built upon the same Enlightenment ideals which gave impetus to the spread of liberalism, American political reality was never abstract. The nation's principles anchored its politics and the Founding Fathers created a government in which the majority of citizens could live with dignity. Why, then, has the political philosophy which was largely responsible for the nation's success been rejected over the past 15 years? Do we simply cast blame, apportion guilt, and pack our tents? Do we snarl at a nation indifferent to our pain? Or is it possible for liberalism again to be a humane and rational way for Americans to live together?

We can continue doing what we have been doing—blame our troubles on Bill Clinton, alternately accusing him of being too moderate and then decrying his lack of moderation. We can fire away at Newt and Bob, express our outrage that they don't play fair. Only it isn't Newt and Bob who are viewed as bankrupt by Americans. Nor is it necessarily Bill Clinton, although by now he leaves us scratching like dogs in a flea circus. It's we who today constitute Pogo's Us. Our vision is what is at issue in an America where the left no longer seems to possess a sense of how things are that is intelligible to others. No matter how irritating a leader he is, that is not Bill Clinton's fault. He has been as liberal as we could have hoped. And it has cost him more than we are willing to admit. The conservative claim that Clinton is an example of liberal type-casting is not far from the truth. As for Gingrich and Dole, fair play has never been what Americans were interested in demanding from their politicians.

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Barring the catastrophe of a massive economic depression—which is not what any of us should want—hope for liberalism's future is tenuous. Having lost our sense of where Arthur Schlesinger's vital center is, we defend not a vision of America but the difficulties facing a battered left. Yet even if the times are as difficult for the rest of the nation as they are for us, should we be expected to take comfort from that? The 1994 election may yet prove to be as radical a revolution as Newt claims. Whether or not that proves to be the case, its immediate eifect has been to let loose a strangely vengeful spirit of meanness in the land. The attack upon liberalism may be deserved. The attack upon America isn't.

I have heard any number of explanations for why this nation has given itself over to meanness at what should be a triumphant moment in its history. But none explain to my satisfaction why the right has succeeded in making meanness the spiritual signature of a country known throughout its history for generosity. Even the left now finds meanness attractive, as if this nation were undergoing a weird purgation ritual, a leeching not of blood but of the sources of national compassion. Reading the morning papers, I feel as if I were watching Triumph of the Will. Only the Horst Wessel Lied is now coming from my throat. I don't mean that America is going fascist. But a constriction of collective empathy and a growing lack of compassion are what one finds throughout America today.

Maybe it is simply difficult to live with meanness without becoming mean oneself. But that is enough to make me feel politically homeless in a nation where the compartmentalization of debate into sound bites chips away at the possibilities of politics, until we are left only with gestures, images, and labels. Discourse about the issues facing America strikes me as similar to a children's book I used to read to my sons. "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you do?" "Nothing." Even the questions make little sense.

It may be that we are living through one of those acrimonious times when America folds into its darker instincts. Like turn-of-the-century imperialism, self-righteousness is a more important factor in the life of the nation than we want to admit. Self-righteousness leads to meanness, and meanness seems to be our new scourge. But it is not the only enemy America faces. A nation that prides itself on a toughness endowed by 19th-century myth and modified by 20th-century hype knows about paradox. That conservatives should be caught up in what used to be the left's penchant for whining is revealing. Their sense of victimization now tingles through every part of the body politic. How else explain their constant whimpering about "the liberal left media?" On airways under siege by Rush and Bob Grant and G. Gordon Liddy, the threat of imminent apocalypse sounds like a chorus of cicadas. Let us stand at Armageddon and battle McNeil/Lehrer! Is that the vision of Robinson Jeflers' "perishing republic" that shines through conservative nightmares? Like "foreigners" who haunted the Indiana Klan in the 1920's, "the liberal left media" haunts the feverish imagination of the right.

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When I retired from teaching a few years back, I began to listen to those talk shows, an experience for which reading Locke and Jefferson and Hobbes had not prepared me. Hosted by men who batter the air with eruptions of bile as predictable as acne on the face of troubled adolescence, the shows fascinate one, both by what they say and by their successful seizure of the airways. Rush Limbaugh, the best known conservative talk show host, is a national figure, his face and opinions as well known in the land as the golden arches of MacDonald's. From book and magazine covers, from the giant billboard on Times Square, he smiles at us. A face not dour but with the rounded look of a man luxuriating in openness and lack of guile. Even on the cover of a magazine for cigar lovers, Rush beams, as if to ask, "How can you dislike a man who looks at a cigar with beatific anticipation and takes such immense pleasure in his own success?"

Lewis Lapham, a sharp observer of this nation's affairs, recently dismissed Limbaugh's "feckless clowning." Gerald Early, another close observer, compared him to the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, as "figure(s) the media can use to give a sellable face and voice to a unique temper among a group of people." Early sees him as frozen in "intense sentimentality," like the Religious Right (with which Limbaugh is probably less comfortable than he pretends). A man on a mission, as eager to spread "the truth" as the evangelist Billy Graham, Limbaugh is a voice of reason. But like so many others convinced of their dispassionate rationality, he proselytizes. With "talent temporarily on loan from God," he yearns for an America cut from the stuff of old John Wayne movies. With little variation in his message, his yearning for that America seems to be the source of the devotion he inspires in listeners. He demonizes opponents of the conservative movement, but not with the absurdities that make Farrakhan seem like a Coney Island barker urging us inside the House of Horrors. As Farrakhan does with Jews, Limbaugh attacks liberals with obiter dicta issued with little thought to accuracy or consequence.

Yet what Limbaugh says is genuinely felt by a growing audience, and the focus of Limbaugh listeners seems more on their paranoia than on his "feckless clowning." There is a reason why Limbaugh has emerged as America's most important political commentator. He is not just another conservative huckster, but a presence trusted by millions so eager to assent to his views that they call themselves "dittoheads." What passes for discussion on his program (callers are screened) reminds me of the clusters of winos one passes in color line would emerge as the problem of the 20th century. He had the elaborate tapestry of Jim Crow segregation in mind, although one might argue that other nightmares ultimately defined our century: the Holocaust precipitated by Nazism, the Stalinesque gulags, the specter of nuclear annihilation, and a host of other threats— environmental, economic, social, and civic—that continue to sound ugly alarms. Still, for Americans, race remains a significant shadow. One thinks, for example, of another 19th-century American writer— Herman Melville—who worried about race in ways that cannot fail to strike us as prophetic. Unlike Twain, Melville's "baggage" was a brooding Calvinism stripped of its theological underpinning—a revisionist version of Original Sin, if you will, but one that continued to insist on sinfulness as a palpable human reality. In this regard he differed sharply with giddy transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau; and in "Benito Cereno," he used the occasion of a rebellion on a slave ship to test out not only the warring claims of illusion and reality, but also the effects of slavery on an individual psyche. Don Amasa Delano, the thickheaded, altogether Innocent American captain, cannot see the mutiny before his very eyes just as, later, he cannot fathom the shadow that hangs eternally over Benito Cereno. "You are saved," he insists—this after the life-threatening rebellion has been crushed. Why, then, is his Spanish counterpart in such a funk? "What has cast such a shadow over you?" he wonders. Benito Cereno's reply is instructive: "The negro"; and for my purposes it stands as yet another twist on Huck Finn's quip about dreams that end by shooting the dreamer.

In the decades since the apparent triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, we have found ourselves in conditions that force us to ruminate on the similarities between earlier American dreamers and ourselves. Perhaps no statement about the great dream of racial justice was more eloquent, more moving than Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words uttered at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

To be sure, King's speech was a laundry list of "dreams," orchestrated in litanies and delivered with the full throat of Southern