Norman Geras has an essay, "The Reductions of the Left", in the latest issue of Dissent. I hope to post something about this soon. In the meantime, here is part of the opening paragraph:
The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, lit up the global landscape. Not only in these two cities, but wherever the news and the pictures reached during the first hours after the planes struck - all over the planet, therefore - there were people quickly able to make out features of the contemporary world that they had not previously taken in, or taken the measure of fully, things that challenged their earlier expectations and existing frameworks of understanding. Not, however, in one quarter. With a section of the Western left, the response was as if everything remained just as it had always been.