When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines such as the Masses and the New Republic. I was energised by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites – at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.
But I got out of college and realised we didn’t live in the industrial age – we live in the information age. The centre of progressive energy moved from the working class to the universities, and not just any universities, but the elite universities.
