I see a lot of activists out here clamoring for revolution: political revolution, social revolution, Unitarian revolution, liberal religious revolution.
All revolutionary upheavals have their life cycle: rise, climax, decline, reaction. Some of us know too well that, despite what true believers might say, high fevers of idealism and soaring moods of self-sacrifice cannot be sustained indefinitely, that they lag and burn themselves out, and that disenchantment and self-doubt eventually creep in.
One could expect from extremists at both ends would take over and take common cause against the rational means. Then come those of the last act who recite their traditional lines: that reforms have proceeded too fast, that disorder has come too far, that extremists must be got in hand, and that law and order must be established at all cost.
And my question is--at what point are we? Basking as we are in the dying embers of the radical movement of the radical 1960s, the hedonistic 1970s, the back-to-dyed-in-the-wool 1980s, and the nihilism of the 1990s, to this generation who has yet to define itself other than by its reliance on vapid consumerism, where are we now?
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If by We you mean the radical political-left, then much of it's truely lost its way.
From Oliver Kamm's review of Nick Cohen's What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way,
‘Over the past century, the Left’s demands have made extraordinary gains. Material advancement, universal education, civil rights, sexual equality, and rights for homosexuals (not yet, unfortunately, extending to marriage and adoption rights) are features of modern Western democracies that have been secured by social pressure and legislative reform. Almost in a fit of pique, liberals seem determined on obliviousness. It is as if there were – as the literary critic Lionel Trilling termed it – an adversary culture. When the most virulent opponents of Western societies express their demands in the language not of a common humanity but of superstition and bigotry, the first instinct of the upholders of the Enlightenment ought to be a statement of militant opposition. In what passes for modern liberalism, the first instinct is commonly instead to inquire of – in the uncelebrated cliché – the root causes of that hatred.’
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