Paco, a frequent contributor to Tim Blair's site, notes that America's leftwing artists need to believe that they live in an oppressive culture, no matter how free from government regulation their speech is:

Pretending that one lives in an oppressive and fearful society, and saying so publicly, creates a sensation of courage and nobility that, in reality, is totally missing from the lives of many of these artsy types. For some reason, it’s not enough for these people to be perceived as interesting, or witty, or brilliant: they have this great need to be perceived as heroic as well.

The trajectory of Wolf’s political evolution has many parallels with that of leftist Western intellectuals, whom historical events compel to abandon their support for communist regimes, but who prove unwilling or unable fully to renounce their earlier convictions. Wolf continued to nurture utopian longings and lingering reverence for Marxist ideals even after the East German regime’s collapse. She responded to the reunification of Germany with a reaffirmation of moral equivalence: if communist systems had turned out to be bad, so were the Western capitalist ones, and there was little to choose from between them. Wolf’s complaints about consumerism expressed these attitudes, as when she writes of a time “when we are supposed to be buried in material objects and become material things ourselves”—a complaint that gives comfort to intellectuals, whose sense of identity is rooted in the role of social critic.

Wolf did not seize the opportunity One Day a Year presented for a thorough, systematic probing of the evolution of her worldview, nor for an understanding of the errors and illusions to which she was susceptible. She seems annoyed by those who “demanded my confession of guilt as an entry into the Western media landscape”—even though she managed to enter it without making such confessions. The sources of her qualified disillusionment with the East German regime remain unclear, as does the extent of her dissatisfaction. What is clear is that for Wolf, not even living most of her life in a highly repressive communist society could extinguish her longing for an ideal, egalitarian, non-commercial society.