BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Breaking the Impasse in the Culture Wars : THE TWILIGHT OF COMMON DREAMS: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, by Todd Gitlin; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, $25, 294 pages

Steven Weinberg, a liberal eighth-grade history teacher in Oakland, was surprised at the silence among conservative parents in 1991 when his school district considered adopting a progressive, K-8 textbook series that talked about “‘Eurocentrism” and “ruthless” conquistadors, that devoted more pages to African and Native American cultures than George Washington and the Wright brothers. “I said to myself, ‘Be happy for small favors,’ ” Weinberg told Todd Gitlin two years later . . . by which time he realized that an attack from the right would actually have been helpful.

In fact, traditionalists didn’t need to lift a finger to compromise the series. Pressure to reject it came not from the right but from the left: a loose consortium of blacks, Muslims and Asian Americans charged that a number of the new textbooks were racist, disrespectful and arrogant. Gary Nash, a history professor at UCLA, had co-written the series as part of his commitment to revising standard, dead-white-male history “from the bottom up,” but his perspective was judged irrelevant: a Japanese American woman, after attacking the series at an Oakland meeting for trivializing the World War II internment of her forbearers (a historical event once completely ignored by textbooks), said, “We want our history written by our people.”

Gitlin reports that Nash, who attended that meeting, was stunned by the woman’s comment, but he was no doubt profoundly depressed by it as well. If just a handful of interest groups in the United States insisted on writing their own histories with their own subjective emphases, and considered every other interpretation biased and unjust, wasn’t the idea of an inclusive American mosaic or rainbow, let alone melting pot, nothing but a bitter joke?

Gitlin, a longtime UC Berkeley sociologist and writer now teaching at New York University, opens “The Twilight of Common Dreams” with the Oakland textbook debacle because it captures so well what he calls “the exhaustion of commonality.” Although Gitlin’s perspective is explicitly left wing, that of an unrepentant (but wiser) ‘60s radical, his analysis is non- partisan; he wants to understand the impasse at which we’ve arrived more than lament it.

One thing he sees is that liberals and conservatives have reversed positions with regard to the average Joe. The right, which used to defend the privileged and propertied against the masses, now claims to represent “normal” Americans; the left, which traditionally called for solidarity among all people, now finds itself splintered into antagonistic, virtually xenophobic blocs. The result? A renewed, intramural cultural war, as dreams of a unified, unitary culture--last seen in the Ozzie-and-Harriet early ‘60s--turned to ash.

With the collapse of communism generating an “enemy crisis” (as Gitlin calls it) in the United States, that cultural war has taken center stage. Every conceivable interest group now fights for its place at the American table, appreciating that the self-definition of the United States is more malleable today than at any time in the past. “What a collective dream gains in vividness,” Gitlin astutely observes, “it loses in fixity,” with each individual able to choose--invent--its own version of the American dream.

Gitlin is distressed by the idea that people in the United States currently seem more interested in fortifying cultural borders than in building bridges. He should be, as should we all: Traditional conservatives have typically favored social insulation--often opposing immigration and integration, and once those battles were lost, favoring assimilation and homogeneity--but it’s more than a little frightening to see such balkanization, and its attendant bunker mentality, practiced and approved by liberals. Is it progress to replace one unclothed emperor (“Our story is the majestic and triumphant march of two principles: freedom and equality”--Allan Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind,” which pretty much kicked off the culture wars) with another (“We want our history written by our people”)?

You might think “The Twilight of Common Dreams” is a discouraging book, but in the end it proves strangely uplifting. That’s because Gitlin has begun to make sense of the culture wars, preoccupied with comprehension rather than with savaging his opponents or appeasing his allies. Lynne Cheney, former chairman (her usage) of the National Endowment for the Humanities, may truly believe that the “liberal” national history standards (largely developed by the same Gary Nash) put forth in 1994 by her own agency were “out of balance” and “politicized,” but as Gitlin points out, her criticism is based on the assumption that when faced with “reverence or explanation,” historians of this country should choose the former. Gitlin, fortunately, leans the other way.