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Canada's 1960s is a big and academically ambitious book: 430 pages of text and 175 pages of endnotes and index. On the surface, Bryan Palmer, Canada Research Chair in Canadian Studies at Trent University, has delivered a welcome update on an under-analyzed decade and a lovely adjunct to Myrna Kostash's seminal 1980 study of the decade, A Long Way from Home.

The first three chapters of Canada's 1960s are readable and frequently insightful as they run through the Diefenbaker era and Canada's transition from the British to the American geopolitical sphere. Along the way, Palmer tracks readers through the dumping of the Avro Arrow, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Gerda Munsinger scandal and the surprisingly intense mutual loathing of John Diefenbaker and his successor as prime minister, Lester B. Pearson. As historians go, Palmer is a particularly gifted storyteller, and he has put several of the early threads of the decade together with unprecedented coherence.

• Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, by Bryan D. Palmer, University of Toronto Press, 605 pages, $35

In A Long Way from Home, Kostash's generously romantic spirit captured the decade from the inside: You could feel the élan, you could hear the music and the poetry, and you were utterly convinced by it that at decade's end, every Canadian, no matter what part of the political and cultural spectrum he or she started from, really was a long way from home.

Palmer, writing more than a quarter-century later, clearly shares Kostash's romantic view of the decade, but somewhere in the passage of time the generosity that infused and directed Kostash has become dogmatic and aggrieved. As the book moves along and the decade advances, Palmer provides readers with progressively less historical narrative and a lot more devotional, Marxist-inflected cultural analysis that is more hagiography than explication. He flubs a chapter on Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau because his radical-left focus makes him distrust McLuhan's mercantile skills and (as with nearly everyone on the left) unable to see past Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act in October 1970.

The mostly illuminating chapter on the roots of the counterculture that follows descends into a rhetoric-cluttered chapter on the trade-union movement's struggles to meet the priorities of a suddenly younger and much more vocal membership while preparing for the Glorious Revolution and Smashing Capitalism.

An image from the book: A feminist protest at York University in 1970

Then we get to the emotional heart of Palmer's project: a disingenuous explication of New Left politics during and after the mid-1960s, and their impact on both other elements of the left and on Canadian society at large – in that order. What's disingenuous is that the New Left in Canada was always the chimera of its own fevered megalomania.

After the NDP and the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) moved against the bristling-with-energy, syndicalism-influenced SUPA (Student Union for Peace Action, the organization that was ground zero of Canada's New Left) in the mid-1960s, the New Left probably never exceeded 500 active Canadian participants, although the number of those who came and left, often disillusioned, was much larger.

“ We see the New Left memorialized in heroic tableaux, fever-browed committees writing revolutionary communiqués and position papers beset with shadowy enemies ”

During the 1970s, the New Left degenerated into a tempest of self-important university-based leftist factions tragically less than the sum of their often-brilliant parts. They spent most of their energy attacking one another over who had the “correct line,” which is to say, the political position most fully justified by quotes from Marx and Lenin. The tragedy of this lay in the fact that all this hair-pulling went on while the corporations were busily taking over functional control of Canada's governments and bringing on the largely unopposed cultural tyranny of the marketplace, of which we have just witnessed the debacle.

Palmer's reason for writing the New Left chapter should have been to offer an explication of where and why progressive politics of the era collapsed into factional infighting. Instead, we see the New Left memorialized in heroic tableaux, fever-browed committees writing revolutionary communiqués and position papers beset with shadowy enemies, and this quibbling explanation:

“If, in the early 1960s, the New Left ... had much to gain by an encounter with the theory and history of revolutionary communism, it had at least grasped that the crude ideology of anti-Marxism was a part of the Cold War conventionality that all radicals were required to shed. By 1970, a changed context and a revived hostility to Marx that would gain momentum through the remaining years of the century meant the New Left's point of departure had a freshness to it that had to be resuscitated.”

I was so bewildered by this that I went back to re-examine Palmer's subtitle, The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era, which I'd found almost inscrutably obtuse at first encounter. I went to the dictionary in order to decipher what Palmer might mean by “irony,” which I've long understood to mean the fundamental intellectual and artistic condition in which you try to see the world for what it is and does while reserving part of your imagination, without cynicism, for the world as it might better be. The OED defines irony as merely “a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.”

Now, I should admit that the post-egalitarian academic Marxist nomenclature Palmer deploys with increasing rigidity in the second half of the book, with its reparational sense of democracy and its belief that Canada is here to account for the injustices of its rich white ancestors and their friends, distresses me. I'm beginning to see the left's “ironic” characterizations of mainstream Canada the same way I see the crazy right-wing Chamber of Commerce business slogans I grew up with and left behind in the 1960s: as inadequately nuanced cartoons of the lives Canadians actually live.

The closed nomenclature of Palmer's academic Marxism, at its extreme in the chapters on the New Left and Red Power, is intellectually oppressive enough that the last half of his book functionally ceases to be history and becomes partisan invective that does little more than preach to the converted. It's a style of exposition that excludes almost as much as it discloses, and it admits nothing of the true irony that history is infused with – the absurdity that makes you laugh both at it and at yourself. Not surprisingly, this is a book short on laughter. And as anyone who was around during the 1960s can tell you, for all the high drama, laughs weren't hard to come by. They were our way of reminding ourselves why we weren't hard-line Soviet-style Commies.

Palmer's Marxism isn't all bad news. It does enable him to penetrate, with rare incisiveness, the pragmatisms of the Cold War, revealing, about as clearly as I've ever seen, how they managed to be grittily Protestant and insane all at once. But for the most part, what started off as a useful and potentially wonderful book turns into a nostalgic rant about the good old days that really weren't all that great.

Brian Fawcett is an editor at www.dooneyscafe.com. He was there for the 1960s, and not always eight miles high.