I'm also struggling with this bit:

"Underlying Judt’s political views was the standard dilemma of bourgeois liberalism. He knew what he was against – brutality, repression, mendacity in all its forms. But he never managed to articulate a coherent, positive principle tying together his manifold ethical concerns. Judt’s political strategy seems to amount to trying to identify the worst among a series of imperfect choices and to revile it."

I've not read Judt's last book, which is clearly a necessity if this view is to be taken as a serious appraisal of his legacy. Nevertheless...

One of the difficulties of "bourgeois liberalism," at least in the U.S., is that it has increasingly expended its energy on reviling the right without itself making a persuasive, constructive case for its own social and political agenda. This leaves us stuck in a descriptive mode, with no one, right or left, advancing any ideas for a way forward.

This is why Judt's "throwing the Maxist baby out with the communist bathwater" is so important. At one point, Marxism was the antithesis of so-called "free market capitalism." Now though, if our intellectuals have tossed that baby out, we are left with nothing from which to craft a new synthesis. If Hegel is to be given any credit, we are going to be trapped in the current descriptive desert until someone -- why not you? -- advances some new ideas contra the capitalist's dream.