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Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Is Radicalism Possible Today?") is off on the spoor of an intellectual ancestor again, this time the Progressive-era antiwar activist Randolph Bourne, one the five protagonists of a new book, Young Radicals in the War for American Ideals, by Jeremy McCarter, a former cultural critic for Newsweek and New York Magazine and a former administrator at the Public Theater, Lin-Manuel Miranda's collaborator on last year's best-selling Hamilton: The Revolution on the smash Broadway musical that had its initial run at that same Public Theater, and I hope that all doesn't sound too dismissive, because I'll bet it's a terrific book that we could all benefit from reading (though I learn from the Kindle preview that McCarter writes in a narrative present tense that he's always having to break, which gets irritating at times). Only Brooks doesn't seem to be inviting us to read it as much as telling us we don't have to, since we can get everything we need from his 800-word takeaway.
Which is that of McCarter's five subjects, Greenwich Village journalist-activists of the period around World War I—the Fabian socialist Walter Lippman, the revolutionary socialists John Reed and Max Eastman, the feminist Alice Paul, and Bourne—Bourne represents David Brooks's mild, sunny, and modest Burkean standpoint, a peculiar kind of radicalism that seems to aim at social transformation a hundred and fifty years or so down the line through pervasive individual niceness:
