SOURCE: Hausknecht, Murray. “Generational Conflict and Left Politics.” Dissent 35, no. 4 (fall 1988): 497-500.

[In the following review, Hausknecht compares the views of Gitlin with those of two of his contemporaries regarding the generational clash between the New Left and the Old Left during the 1960s.]

The subtitle of Todd Gitlin's book about the sixties, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, echoes the famous tag, “the best of times, the worst of times.” It was an intensely political time and for some the memory shines with nostalgic glow; others remember it as quite the worst of times. Each memory suppresses the other, and what is needed, but hard, is to see both.

It was also a time of significant cultural changes inseparable from politics: a shift in sexual mores, beginnings of the women's movement, the spread of casual drug use, changes in popular music. Gitlin reports that early SDSers followed Bob Dylan's career “as if he were singing our song; we got in the habit of asking where he was taking us next.” The radical politics of those years cannot be understood apart from what came to be called “the counterculture.”

But “radical” is too simple a rubric under which to group events that run from the sit-ins of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1960 and end with the violent Weathermen. The term “New Left” also conjures up too neat an image, since by the end of 1965 there is in the Students for a Democratic Society an “old guard” who exercise no decisive influence on its policies—the New Left has become by now a different kind of New Left. We cannot usefully think of the sixties as if they were a unitary whole.

That much is clear from Gitlin and from James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, though their focus, while overlapping, is different. Gitlin, part of the SDS old guard and now a sociologist at Berkeley, takes his political biography as a baseline for a fine, wide-ranging analysis of the student movement and its relations to the cultural events of the time. Miller was a demonstrator in the streets of Chicago in 1968 and has previously written a book on Rousseau's political theory. If Gitlin's work is a sociocultural analysis, Miller's is acute intellectual history.

The differences between the New Left at the beginning and the end of the sixties prompt questions about what happened in between and to what extent the beginning foreshadowed the end. And what made the New Left “new”?

By the middle fifties American left-wing parties had all but disappeared. The collapse of this ideological old left and the early stirrings of the New Left is the subject of Maurice Isserman's If I Had a Hammer. … Isserman, a historian who has written a book about the Communist party, offers a fair and thoughtful story of the radical situation from the end of World War II to the early sixties. He shows that the disintegration of the Communist party after the Khrushchev revelations had already begun under the impact of the Cold War, the passing of Earl Browder from the leadership, and McCarthyism. Elsewhere on the left, a once- or semi-Trotskyist group under Max Shachtman merged with the Socialist party. Sectarianism triumphed in this union, and whatever political potentialities this merger had soon disappeared.

With the collapse of the organized old left, there was a “missing generation.” The new generation of the sixties was politically unanchored; it had few if any connections with groups that had earlier formed the American left. Without such anchorage political principles and ideas remain wholly theoretical; unexposed to the realities of everyday political life, thought becomes “mere ideology.” Some consequences of having only a tenuous connection to a living radical tradition soon became apparent in SDS.

The membership was young; they were, after all, Students for a Democratic Society. “Youth” designates chronological age, and this implies that the experiences of the young in modern societies are different from those of their elders. And soon the differences between the two experiences unavoidably produce generational conflict.

“Youth,” however, also suggests “youthfulness,” a quality or spirit, a tangle of many strands of feeling and thought: unbounded optimism and self-confidence, an eagerness for adventure, an impatience with the world, a keen moral commitment, a conviction that one understands more deeply than those trapped in existing institutions, a yearning for transcendent experiences, a desire for intense social relationships—all bound together by highly charged libidinous energies.

The association of youthfulness with chronological youth is not invariable. Cultural wisdom is full of patronizing allusions to those who “retain their youthful idealism” as well as approving recognitions of those “wise beyond their years.” We approve of the latter because they have been successfully socialized; unqualified youthfulness suggests that the task of directing energies into approved channels has not yet been completed.

Socialization is the elders' attempt to transmit the fruits of their experience. Typically, the more experience a person has had, the greater his or her appreciation of the need to curb and channel desires and passions. But such knowledge, “learned from experience,” is rejected by the spirit of youthfulness as an attempt to impose dull restraints, and this resistance then sharpens generational conflict. The elders see this rejection as a challenge to their authority: their “wisdom” is being questioned. Politically, then, youthfulness is always a threat to authority and its order. Young Turks do not challenge the powers-that-be only because they have dissident views but also because they are youthful Turks. And often they are helped by allies hiding behind the mask of age.

Domesticating youthfulness requires the integration of the young into everyday life, but in recent decades higher education has postponed integration. Middle-class students cluster for years on university campuses which sometimes resemble youth ghettos. Many find this life irksome because it offers too little scope for the energies of youthfulness. The itch for action characteristic of SDS was one force leading to its formation. Its leftward orientation was, in part, the result of family background; a disproportionate number of early SDS members had parents with old left experience.

In 1960 there was a model of political action that was almost an ideal embodiment of the spirit of youthfulness. “SNCC moved us,” Gitlin recalls, “seized our imaginations. From 1960 on, SDS felt wired to these staggeringly brave, overalled work-shirted college students … SNCC had suffered, SNCC was there, bodies on the line, moral authority incarnate.”

SNCC also proved the importance of student activists. Aside from a minuscule number of young people organizationally connected with the remnants of the old left—e.g., the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL), whose membership in 1960 Isserman puts at 300—politically interested youth had no identification to fall back on other than “student.” In 1960 to be a YPSL was to have a political identity, but to be a member of, say, Tocsin at Harvard only meant you were interested in political issues. Tending to dominate identity, the student status made it easier to succumb to the notion that students could be a decisive political force. SNCC confirmed this heady illusion.

It was also reinforced by the authoritative voice of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who was seen, Miller says, as “a rebel and iconoclast in a world of button-down pedants” (a youthful ally among the elders). In a 1960 paper Mills celebrated “the young intelligentsia,” and that article, Tom Hayden later told Miller, “helped us make sense of what we were doing … it made us feel as if we had been anointed.”

Mills's influence is apparent in the notion of “participatory democracy.” As against mass society Mills stressed the importance of “publics,” people in face-to-face interaction freely exchanging opinions and reaching decisions. Participatory democracy rests on the premise that without such interaction there is no real democracy. Another influence was Arnold Kaufman, one of Hayden's teachers at the University of Michigan and the coiner of the phrase. For Kaufman politics was not simply a way to achieve goals; it was also a way to find, as the SDS Port Huron statement said, “a meaning in life that is personally authentic.”

Participatory democracy was a notably ambiguous concept. That is only to be expected, Miller maintains, since it contains “two distinct political visions.” One “is of a face-to-face community of friends sharing interests in common; the second is of an experimental collective, embarked on a high risk effort to test the limits of democracy in modern life.” The first is an instrumental orientation, and it became the animating principle for SDS groups that went into urban slums to organize the poor. There they lived, worked, and made decisions through consensus. The other vision represents an expressive component. “The guiding values of democratic experimentalism,” Miller explains, “are spontaneity, imagination, passion, playfulness, movement—the sensation of being on edge, at the limits of freedom.” Gitlin, too, sees in the idea of participatory democracy “an expressive tendency … in revolt against all formal boundaries and qualifications. … It trusted feeling and wanted ‘to let it all hang out’. … Its faith was that a politics of universal expression would make the right things happen. …” All of which owes much to the spirit of youthfulness.

That spirit played a role in the break with the League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's formal parent. Michael Harrington and others in the LID thought the Port Huron statement showed an insufficient sense of the dangers of Soviet communism as well as an antagonism toward organized labor. Hayden defended it vehemently, and Richard Flacks, another SDS leader, later told Miller that Hayden “felt that he'd put too much anti-Communism into [it] already. The only reason he'd put in any anti-Communism was to placate these people who were bigots and were living in the Cold War past.” This conflict was clearly generational, with perceptions of the Hungarian Revolution emblematic of the gulf between generations. For Harrington, as Gitlin sees it, it was “the living, burning epitome of his politics,” while for the radical members of SDS “‘Hungary’ was ancient history, something out of their early teens; it signified not so much a crushed revolution as a tattered banner in the Cold War. …”

Many others besides Harrington believed that Hungary was not at all “ancient history”; for them it was a significant marker in their lives. But for many in SDS, the significant marker was Fidel Castro; the Cuban revolution was imaginatively appropriated and made part of their identities.

Nor did the spirit of youthfulness always help matters. In an interview with Isserman, Gitlin remembers that when he first read a draft of the Port Huron statement he was “absolutely enraptured by it, thinking, ‘My God, this what I feel.’ I wouldn't even say ‘think’ because my thoughts were too inchoate.” Since the statement was constructed to have exactly that emotional impact, his response was not unusual. But for those whose own youthfulness had been tempered by the experience of the radical politics of the old left, the Port Huron statement could only be a source of impatience.

Logically it might seem that the writers around Dissent would be one old left group SDS could have felt close to. Isserman, who devotes a chapter to Dissent, points to its continual warnings on the dangers of sectarianism and its emphasis on a conception of politics that was least partly congruent with the SDS vision. In 1956 Lewis Coser wrote that “one of the most significant contributions of a radical movement … will be to allow at least some men to fight their way to personal autonomy. …” Yet what many remember is bitter conflict between the two groups. In retrospect, the conflict seems almost inevitable.

The flight from sectarianism among the Dissent people meant a greater receptivity to ideas of political coalition and the compromising of differences in behalf of common ends. An emphasis on the value of personal autonomy meant, again in Coser's words, “that the struggle for civil and intellectual liberties is as important as the struggle for industrial democracy.” But Coser also stressed that a desirable political life does not sacrifice “the here-and-now … as a necessary preparation for the revolutionary days to come.” A premise like that requires a strong interest in maintaining and extending the welfare state. Dissent, without abandoning its basic commitment to socialism, began to move at increasing speed toward a kind of liberalism.

To the New Left, however, liberalism was, in the cliché of the era, “part of the problem.” Gitlin discerns “a collision of political cultures” in the contrast of liberal and New Left perspectives. “Beneath the language of justice, in SDS's eyes, the liberal manager is a custodian of order. … The New Left style … valued informality, tolerated chaos, scorned order.” A radical politics demanded a rejection of liberal politics. Miller cites an influential 1962 editorial in Studies on the Left which argued that not the conservative right but the liberals stood in the way of social change.

The New Left leaders, as Hayden told Miller, “thought our vision lay in the traditions of the left, but they had to be constructed all over again, in our time and our place.” There were differences in style as well: “SDS was a group like the Jesuits or the Bolsheviks. It was a band of true believers taking action to catalyze and convert.”

When Dissent editors met with Hayden and other SDS leaders including Gitlin—who comments on the meeting—it was a microcosm of generational conflict. “Above all, Hayden was inspired by, and loyal to, the handfuls of students who had succeeded in making history, whether through sitting-in at southern lunch counters or storming the Moncada barracks in Cuba.” When the meeting ended, the Austrian Socialist Joseph Buttinger gave Hayden and Gitlin copies of his book, The Twilight of Socialism. They respected Buttinger for his heroic past, but “through no fault of his own, history condemned him to be a loser. Not for us the elegies of the twilight; for us the celebration of sunrises!”

As one looks back at the student movement, it is precisely the spirit of generosity that is most impressive. Unselfishness marked much of its thought and action. Blacks sitting-in at lunch counters were turning away from the traditional black bourgeoisie, and middle class white students who went south to work in the civil rights movement were, for a while, transcending barriers that separated them from the poor. The sheer guts of those activists still commands admiration.

Such students were morally serious and possessed of a genuine desire to grapple with the evils of racism, poverty, and powerlessness. Their activism helped reawaken interest among many of the old left who had retreated from politics. The qualities of generosity, moral seriousness, and courage did not disappear even when the student movement became more problematic. I am thinking here of the antiwar movement and some aspects of the commune movement in its search for ways of realizing utopian goals. But the antiwar movement signaled a turning point.

The March on Washington, the teach-ins, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement brought thousands of new members into SDS. Yet, Isserman points out, just at this critical time of rapid growth, the SDS leadership, full of “heedless self-confidence,” left to organize the urban poor. Inspired by their own ideology and the example of SNCC, they went to work with “real people” and turned over their posts to new, untried leaders. Their fierce commitment and their itch for action now showed an absurd side. Miller describes how the new leadership, attempting “an experiment in office democracy,” plunged the SDS national office into “mounting chaos. … Elitism was routed but virtually no mail was processed.”

Numbers alone did not change SDS; the new recruits were qualitatively different. Gitlin uses their own self-description, “prairie power,” to distinguish them from older SDS generations. They were younger; there were fewer Jews; more were from working class families; “and they were less intellectual, less articulate. …” They came from the small towns of the midwest and southwest where their support for civil rights earned them the label of “Communist” and estranged them from parents who had voted for Barry Goldwater. The rupture of relations with family and community joined to the youthful suspicion of authority meant that “they encountered no obstacles to moving further left-ward.” Nor did it check the expressive tendencies encouraged by SDS ideology. Many became highly vulnerable to countercultural freakishness, with youthful energy dribbling away into the pseudopolitics of the Yippies. The SDS old guard living among the urban poor and preoccupied with “the we-happy-few mystique of the early years of face-to-face organizing,” writes Gitlin, “failed to take these ‘prairie people’ into our own old-boy networks. … Whereupon a generational chasm opened up within the student movement, reproducing the one that was opening up in the wider society.” He neglects to mention that the SDS old guard was in almost the same position with respect to the new recruits as the old left had been vis-a-vis the New Left.

Some of the consequences of rigid ideology and untempered youthfulness became apparent in the antiwar movement. The New Left had always been sympathetic to Castro and Third World revolutionaries, and these sympathies made it easier for students to assume, as Gitlin puts it, that “the Vietnamese were a more victimized and better organized version of ourselves”; support for them was part of the struggle here in America. Hayden's well-publicized trip to Hanoi helped reinforce this vision. Nor was the antiwar movement helped when television viewers saw demonstrators waving Vietcong flags.

Running through New Left ideology was a profound distrust of leadership. The admired model was what Miller calls “the self-abnegating (anti-) leadership style” of SNCC. Problems like how to make leaders accountable were not pertinent for those who believed that face-to-face groups living by consensus represented the core meaning of democracy. Yet at the same time those who elaborated this version of democracy defined student intellectuals as an “anointed” elite with a “mission.” The ultimate consequences of these visions became visible in the final stages of SDS's life. In its last days, according to Gitlin, “all factions of the SDS strutted about as self-appointed vanguards in search of battalions,” and discovered the key to successful organizing in … Leninism! History as farce, but only if we forget the Weathermen.

The decade ended violently: police riots, ghetto riots, murders of civil rights workers, assassinations. To see the Weathermen as simply a product of radical politics gone completely off the rails is to ignore a broader social and cultural context from which they emerged. For the Weathermen were one possible end-product of New Left ideas, and in Gitlin's unsentimental description we can see them in the narrower context of New Left ideology and the spirit of youthfulness:

They were pure New Left in a way—self-enclosed, contemptuous of liberalism, romantic about Third World revolutions, organized in small squads, exuberant with will, courageous, reckless, arrogant, burning to act as if anything might be possible.

The Weathermen, however, were only one possible outcome.

The student movement was a youth movement, and inevitably youthfulness is tempered by experience and the challenge of succeeding generations. This is evident in these three intelligent books. If these writers can be taken as representative figures, then perhaps the student movement will have long-lasting effects. American politics, both liberal and democratic socialist, may yet be enriched by a youthfulness that will have assimilated what was most positive in the thought and most generous in the spirit of the student movement.