Card is unfair to link String Theory to the ridiculous social "theories" of the leftist intellectuals. Physicists doing String Theory don't deny objective reality. They strive to make String Theory meaningful, e.g. wanting the parameters of the Standard Model fall out as a unique solution. Smolin's real point is that it just hasn't worked out and so we must pursue other approaches too.
It's also interesting that Card omits a point that Smolin makes early in the book; I'd call it Smolin's basic observation. In the past several centuries, every quarter century or so has seen a breakthrough in fundamental physics except the last quarter. One can't help but feel that something's wrong in the state of Denmark. Smolin lays the blame squarely on the dominance of String Theory in the theoretical physics community.
As I say, I'm in the middle. It's not a bad book so far but I hope Smolin doesn't tell me again that "not only don't they know the equations of the basic theory, they don't even have an approach to figure them out" and "no new predictions have been made" and several other critiques. I get it already.
Well, we don't know that it hasn't happened this quarter-century; we just know it hasn't happened famously.