The article suggests that the Left suffers from the linguistic two-party system -- George Orwell versus Theodor Adorno:
***** Orwell's political sins were manifold: He disapproved of birth control, he was a Blimpish sort of British patriot, and (as one Web site put it in a warning against taking "Politics and the English Language" too seriously), he collaborated "with the B.B.C. against fascists in India in World War II, and wrote...in part to justify the work his journalism had done--for the Empire." Last year, controversy flared again over the fact that Orwell, shortly before his death, jotted down a list of people he regarded as politically compromised by their sympathy for Stalin and had it conveyed to the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office.
Adorno's case is almost equally vexed. There are some pretty strange lines in Minima Moralia--for example, "Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together." In recent years, proponents of cultural studies have ridiculed Adorno's uninformed ranting about the evils of jazz and popular music. And then there is the matter of the great man's truly awe-inspiring capacity for contemplative passivity. This is someone (unlike his fellow critical theorist Herbert Marcuse) who steadfastly refused to be drawn into taking concrete positions on matters of pressing political importance. One of his oldest friends from Frankfurt, Leo Lowenthal (who ended up as a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley), has said that Adorno had a simple motto: "Don't participate." *****
Both with regard to style and content, political and aesthetic, neither Orwell nor Adorno would do. Just as we reject the two-party monopoly of Democrats and Republicans, we should reject the choice between Orwell and Adorno.
Yoshie