In my comments on “A Universal Aspiration,” which is the hope for a future redemption, I observed that radicals, progressives, and people who are currently mislabeled “liberals” are really members of a religious faith, albeit a secular one. Like Christians and members of other religions they believe the world we live in is a fallen place and will one day be redeemed. Whereas traditional religionists believe the redemption will come through an act of God, the modern secular religionists believe it will come by virtue of their own actions. This makes them truly dangerous. Traditional religions commit heinous crimes when their members believe that they are acting in the name of God. Radicals and progressives believe this all the time, since they are the agents who – given enough power – will create a world that is socially just. In their eyes, the beautiful future is out there, waiting for us to choose it. Therefore they regard those who oppose them not merely as mistaken but as evil.

This is a large part of what makes human moral progress a chimera and the determination to force it on the rest of us, dangerous.

Along with Radical Son, I consider these my best work.

I have written a series of books on the debasement of American liberal arts colleges and their curricula, including “The Professors,” “Indoctrination U.,” “One-Party Classroom” (with Jacob Laksin) and “Reforming Our Universities.”

Inexplicable because an intellectual lightweight like West could never otherwise have risen to the academic and cultural heights he did.

In fact, as I have explained elsewhere (e.g., in “The Politics of Bad Faith” this is a misnomer. It is progressives who are reactionary, promoting a variety of statism and social hierarchy in the form of “identity politics” as a revolt against the liberties and individualism of the 18th century revolutions and the market societies they gave birth to.

Trilling’s novel antedated them, but the “New Left” radicals of the Sixties defined themselves as “anti-anti Communists” taking the same position that Laksell and the fellow-travelers of the Old Left had taken. The term “progressive” is a good umbrella for a movement that extends from the far left to the heart of the Democratic Party today.

Trilling’s novel was called “The Middle of the Journey,” a title taken from the opening line of Canto 1, part 1

I mean of course Barack Obama, whose radical career has been traced and documented in Stanley Kurtz’s admirable study, “Radical In Chief.”

The essay on Christopher I feel is one of the better pieces I have written/ But in some ways Christopher does not belong with the other characters in the text. He was far wiser and far more self-aware than the others, and would undoubtedly have agreed with much of what I have written about them. On the other hand, he chose radicals as his comrades and, as I show in the text, his vision was obstructed in crucial ways by his lingering radical faith, particularly on the subject of Israel but in many other areas as well.