The new Progressive Book Club started operations on Monday, luring prospective members with an initial offer of three left-of-center books for just $1.
Formed to imitate the highly-successful Conservative Book Club, the left-wing group will offer books chosen by a panel that includes novelists Michael Chabon, Erica Jong and Barbara Kingsolver and activists-cum-journalists like Todd Gitlin and the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Like any good information-age startup, it will likewise offer a social-networking component.) Whether it will succeed in an age when most book clubs -- the conservative one included -- are stagnating or taking losses is one question. Whether it will be good for liberals is another.
The announcement prompted David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon and Schuster, to crack: "One might say the entire book industry is largely a progressive book group." It's a line that hints at both the promise and the peril that ventures like this one hold out for the American Left.
For a long time, liberals have enjoyed the advantages that flow from dominating the commanding heights of culture, and the disadvantages as well. On the one hand, the near-universal dominance of left-of-center ideas in the publishing houses and TV networks, universities and Hollywood studios has given liberals tremendous power to set the terms of national debate. On the other, the establishmentarian spirit that comes with this sort of dominance has tended to breed cocooning, sclerosis, and the inability of many liberals to take their own side in an argument, which has often left them at the mercy of the tight-knit and pugilistic insurgents of the modern Right.
Enter the Bush-era progressive movement, which has set out to copy the tactics and institutions that paved conservatism's road out of the political wilderness -- the think tanks and political action committees, the media watchdog groups and talk radio shows, and yes, now a book club. This insurgent mentality holds out the promise that the liberalism of the future might have the best of both words: The power of an unchallenged establishment and the spirit of an embattled movement. But it holds out a danger as well: Namely, that left-wing activists might be copying conservatism just as it has entered its decadent phase, and they'll be stuck with a host of hyper-partisan, echo-chambering institutions that eventually leave them more cocooned and out-of-touch than ever.
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