Peter Collier and I drew attention to this nihilism more than a decade ago in “Destructive Generation,” the book we wrote about our second thoughts. We, too, pointed out the sense of alienation as a defining element of the “progressive” left. As editors of Ramparts magazine, we had produced a cover featuring a 7-year-old, the son of our art director Dugald Stermer, holding the flag of the Vietcong, America’s communist enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said, “Alienation is when your country is at war, and you want the other side to win.” Oddly enough, in “Destructive Generation,” we offered as an exemplary statement of this alienation a quote from Michael Walzer: “It is still true,” Walzer had written, “that only when I go to Washington to demonstrate do I feel at home there.” The statement made more than a decade ago measures the profundity of Walzer’s present second thoughts. And it takes courage to think them. Like Christopher Hitchens, who published a beautiful tableau of his own transition for Vanity Fair after 9/11, Michael Walzer has come home.

– Yes, Virginia, There is a “Decent Left”

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