Todd Gitlin’s “The Intellectuals and the Flag” (Columbia University Press, 192 pages, $24.95) is illuminating but at times frustrating. Mr. Gitlin, a professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, argues in this collection of previously published essays that what used to be called the New Left still has something to offer a post-September 11 America. He wants to show that a critique of the economic inequities of American life, combined with an understanding of the America created by September 11 and the war on terror, will revivify liberalism’s prospects. Indeed, he sees this collection as contributing “to a new start for intellectual life on the left.”

Mr. Gitlin is himself something of a liberal monument, with sterling left-wing credentials. As a young man, he met with the Viet Cong in the 1960s and was an editor of Dissent magazine. He served as president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, whose infamous 1962 Port Huron statement condemned an “unreasoning anticommunism” and proposed 50-year plans, at America’s expense, to ready the Third World for modernity.

Mr. Gitlin, however, is also known for his sharp opinions of his fellow liberals. He has criticized the left’s “self-indulgence” during the anti-Bush protests of the 2004 election season, and has generally disdained their pose of self-righteous anger at the expense of practical politics. What he calls the “fundamentalist left is not only morally and strategically mistaken, it is hopeless … Viewing U.S. power as an indivisible evil, the fundamentalist left has logically foregone the possibility of any effective opposition beforehand.”

Nor does he commit the all-too-common error of blaming America for the terrorist attacks. Whatever America’s faults, “the past is what it is, and the killers are who they are.” Further, as he writes in the title essay, September 11 revitalized patriotism, and the fundamentalist left has been too quick to disdain the feelings the terrorist attacks engendered among a normally apathetic populace.

Mr. Gitlin argues that the embrace of patriotism (at least, a certain kind of patriotism) will be essential to the revival of liberalism in America as a politically viable position. He saw, on September 11, the volunteers rushing to ground zero, and he too hung his flag after September 11 in honor of those volunteers and, later, of the soldiers sent far abroad to serve.

So far, this is all to the good. A disillusioned radical is better than nothing and, with intellectuals such as Christopher Lasch no longer on the scene, someone is needed to take on the mantle of the liberal intellectual who is also indisputably American. The Democrats, as the liberal political party, seem moribund when it comes to ideas. But America has a long tradition of radical protest, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the late Senator Eugene McCarthy to Ross Perot, that can serve as a useful counterpoint to conventional wisdom about civic culture and American politics.

But though Mr. Gitlin scores some points, he succeeds only partially in his project. He recognizes the perils of ideology – though he seems harder on unnamed members of the “right-wing” than on liberals, and criticizes the academic left-wing escapism into trendy “theory.” In what is perhaps the best essay, “The Values of Media, the Values of Citizenship, and the Values of Higher Education,” Mr. Gitlin excoriates consumer culture.

The terms he uses here would be acceptable even to conservatives who dispute the undiluted goodness of the free market. He mounts a defense of the core curriculum and condemns violent video games and the flickering hypnotism of electronic media. In another essay, the “Antipolitical Populism of Cultural Studies,” he lashes out at the trendy cultural mandarins who believe they are engaging in “radical politics” from the safe perches of university chairs.

Most significantly, perhaps, Mr. Gitlin traces the reasons for the left’s rejection of anything that supports the use of American power abroad or patriotism at home. He traces this (of course) to Vietnam and the “clear and intense” skepticism the war and scandals such as Watergate inspired in liberals of their own country. In the face of what they concluded was gross iniquity, the left equated patriotism with abetting evil.

The ideological purity of these 1960sera radicals meant that even when the United States did something in conformity with the left’s vision (Mr. Gitlin uses the intervention in Bosnia as an example),liberals could not support it, because it smacked too much of jingoism. In this worldview, Iraq is beyond the pale – even as, though he does not mention it, President Reagan’s war against communism was.

Despite these strengths, the book will appeal really only to that generation of Vietnam-era intellectuals who still believe left-wing nostrums, suitably repackaged, will carry the day. Despite Mr. Gitlin’s obvious sincerity and vigor of thought, these essays remain firmly in the bedrock of conventional liberalism. There is no talk here of immigration, abortion, crime, or other issues most voters consider central to their understanding of a civil community. Questions of culture are here, but they are refracted through Mr. Gitlin’s triple inheritance of Riesman, Mills, and Howe. These three are largely poor models for today’s debates.

Mills and Howe were, by Mr. Gitlin’s account, Marxists of one stripe or another. They may have shared some of Mr. Gitlin’s misgivings about culture, and may have had a broadness of mind preferable in comparison to television pundits, but on the central question of the 20th century – freedom or totalitarianism – they were intellectually on the wrong side. As sociologists or, in Howe’s case, a literary critic, these three may have been “exemplary intellectuals,” as Mr. Gitlin calls them, but in terms of politics, one can find better teachers.

Mr. Gitlin’s wry tale of “lessons in patriotism taught by Communists” during the 1960s illustrates the same blind spot. There is an American tradition of patriotism and engaged dissent that has little – if anything – to do with the left-wing tradition Mr. Gitlin wishes to revive, which has different sources and different ends. Mr. Gitlin’s call for a patriotism “between Cheney and Chomsky” disparages was he calls Americans’ thin patriotism. Even when calling for a newly engaged leftism, disdain for those not imbued with the revolutionary zeal breaks through.

While perhaps we all are called to do more patriotic activity, the solutions Mr. Gitlin proposes – national service, for example – are unanchored in any tradition that would appeal to those outside the remaining liberal intelligentsia. “Intellectuals and the Flag” is a sincere, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to explain the appeal of patriotism to liberals, and to wake the left from its ideological doldrums.

Mr. Russello last wrote in these pages on the Roosevelt-Stalin correspondence. He is the editor of the University Bookman.