SOURCE: McConnell, Scott. “Resurrecting the New Left.” Commentary 84, no. 4 (October 1987): 31-8.

[In the following essay, McConnell discusses The Sixties, along with other histories addressing the rise of the New Left, finding that Gitlin's account of the formation of SDS and its offshoot, the Weathermen, helps dispel some of the myths associated with those groups.]

Wrapped within the current boom in 60's rock-and-roll, and within the more elusive nostalgia for a time when drugs and promiscuous sex seemed there to be enjoyed without consequence, lies a movement to bring about a resurrection of the 60's in their specifically political aspect. The movement finds more or less innocent expression in the efforts of Democratic presidential hopefuls to claim for themselves the spirit of John F. Kennedy. But there are signs of another, more radical, and possibly more consequential political recapitulation, whose spirit is caught not by the New Frontier but in the return to campus of aging former leaders of the New Left. While this phenomenon obviously represents an effort to revive the radicalism of the 60's, it has also found support in pockets of mainstream liberalism.

Thus to the growing pile of recent memoirs and anthologies celebrating the radical movements of that decade—and of such mass-market books as Do You Believe in Magic?¹ and It Was Twenty Years Ago Today—can now be added three sympathetic histories [James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago; Maurice Isserman's If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left and Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage] of the New Left. These works all concentrate on the New Left's early period, and particularly on the first years of its flagship organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and on the politics which led, in the summer of 1962, to the drafting of the manifesto of the New Left, the Port Huron Statement.

It is not hard to see why there should be so much interest in early SDS. At first glance, it seems the perfect avatar of an indigenous American radicalism, nonideological and unspoiled by the intolerance which later came to dominate SDS itself and the New Left in general. To anyone wishing to contemplate how a radical movement with a considerable mass base can spring quickly and forcefully out of a seemingly quiescent political era (like the 1950's), SDS is a tactical inspiration as well. In short, as past memory or as future model, Port Huron represents, mutatis mutandis, something like the Russian Revolution before Stalin, or even before Kronstadt.

In a passage that is likely to set the standard for dewy-eyed invocations of the idealistic spirit of Port Huron, Hendrik Hertzberg, the former editor of the New Republic (and speechwriter for Jimmy Carter), has recently written:

In those pre-Beatles, pre-acid days, they could have passed for the executive board of the Young Republicans or the Young Democrats. But theirs was not a politics of parties, nor of candidates, nor even of issues. It was a politics of vision and values. They talked about civil rights and foreign policy and welfare and education, but the questions that underlay their discussion were bigger ones: What makes for a meaningful life? What is a good society? How can the world be remade? At 5 o'clock in the morning of June 16, 1962, after four days of intense talk, of cutting and pasting and very little sleep, they ratified their text and walked wearily out into the damp rosy dawn, knowing they had done something important. Some of them held hands on the shore of the lake, and felt exalted.

These words come from Hertzberg's glowing New York Times review of James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.² Now a Newsweek writer, Miller during the late 60's was a member of the small anarchist faction within SDS that later grew dismayed by the organization's turn to a Marxism violent in word and deed. In this work, which is in most respects the least significant of the three under consideration here, he says that he was pulled to his subject by a desire to uncover what was inspiring about “America's last great experiment with democratic idealism” and to stand it against “Ronald Reagan's era of cultural retrenchment and expansive jingoism.”

In pursuit of this objective, Miller provides a microscopic examination of the factors that led several of the Port Huron drafters to get involved with SDS. He has extensively interviewed not only Tom Hayden, the document's principal author, but several less prominent figures; he duly notes the pervasive influence of the left-wing sociologist C. Wright Mills; he describes the effect of the emotions generated by the early civil-rights movement; he has pored over the records of the various drafts of the statement, and dwells lovingly on its sonorous preamble (“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit”); he makes a stab at saying something comprehensible about the statement's proposal for “participatory democracy”—though he is finally unable to do anything more with this idea than SDS itself managed during its short life. But Miller fails to deal satisfactorily with the central historical question about SDS, which is how a movement that seemed so promising at its inception managed, in a period of about six years, to recapitulate the entire moral history of Western socialism, from the utopians to Stalinism. Put succinctly the question is, to what extent was the shape of the fully grown New Left prefigured by the New Left in embryo?

Plausible answers to this question are scattered throughout Miller's material, but he seems curiously reluctant to grapple with them. The single sharply contested issue at Port Huron concerned the stance of SDS toward Communists, both in the United States and abroad. In 1962, SDS was still the nearly dormant youth affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a socialist organization under the tutelage of Norman Thomas whose members for the better part of the century had been engaged, with limited success, in hand-to-hand combat with the American Communist party for leadership of the American Left. To some if not all the young people who gathered at Port Huron, those battles were deadwood from the past, of no concern to their effort to generate a revitalized Left. More, they saw in American anti-Communism an attempt to divert the country from progressive renewal, and therefore they condemned it.

Michael Harrington, then the youngest of the old socialists, was also present at Port Huron, as were some of his political associates from the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). Harrington and colleagues stayed up late into the night arguing with as much force as they could muster that a manifesto of an organization purporting to inspire a renewed democratic Left must be anti-Communist both in word and spirit. He was humored by the addition of several clauses, so that in its final form the Port Huron Statement condemned Communism with nearly as much energy as it condemned anti-Communism.

Miller presents Harrington and his YPSL allies as dogmatists and ideologues, mired in the irrelevant quarrels of the past; he is abetted in this exercise by the present-day Michael Harrington, who now views his own behavior at Port Huron as excessive. In any case, the anti-anti-Communism which was the animating tone of the statement proved extremely irritating to the board of the LID, and resulted in a nasty divorce between SDS and its parent organization—a divorce which became part of the folklore of the early New Left.

Whether such wounds would have healed in time is doubtful; but as it was, they were reopened the next year, when Tom Hayden and other SDS leaders met with the editorial board of the democratic-socialist quarterly Dissent. Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, has since written twice about the encounter; both times he has stressed how put off he was by Hayden's enthusiasm for Fidel Castro, by his tendency to contrast the ideal of “participatory democracy” with the inadequate version practiced in the United States, and by much else. After the meeting, Howe has related, the old socialists gathered around the table commented all at once that in Hayden's “clenched style—that air of distance suggesting reserves of power—one could already see the beginnings of a commissar.” Two months after the Dissent meeting, at the 1963 National Council meeting of SDS, a warm ovation was given to an outsider who had been observing the proceedings—Alger Hiss.

In Miller's account the rupture between SDS and the democratic socialists remains something of an enigma. There were no explicit political issues on which the two sides disagreed. The socialists were at one with SDS in condemning what they viewed as the Kennedy administration's go-slow policy on civil rights; they were at one in wanting the United States to cease atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and to be more forthcoming in the search for an arms-control agreement; they were at one in seeking to break the grip of the conservative Southern “Dixiecrats” on the Democratic party, and to move the party leftward. Given all this, why should the anti-Stalinism of the LID and of the editors of Dissent have proved a pill which the fledgling student organization found impossible to swallow?

Miller fails to answer this question, but light is shed on it from other quarters. Both Maurice Isserman's If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left³ and Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage⁴ provide a psychological and political context which makes the split less difficult to fathom.

Like Miller, Isserman is a former member of SDS who wants to rehabilitate the political 60's and to counter the notion that it was a “time of bizarre and even sinister maladjustment, thankfully put behind us.” He is also one of a coterie of young historians, formerly of the New Left, who have taken the American Communist party (CP) as their principal area of inquiry. In previous work Isserman has sought to illuminate the ways in which the CP functioned as an integral part of an indigenous American radicalism; for him, the fact that the party leadership took its political directives from Moscow is considerably less salient than was its participation in the day-to-day struggles of broader American social movements. Such a perspective may not be a useful lens through which to analyze the CP, but it does clarify something about the New Left at Port Huron that up to now has remained obscure.

What Isserman provides, and Miller does not, is a panorama of the broad culture of the American Left at the time of Port Huron, the soil in which the young SDS plant sank its first roots. In Isserman's account, that ground was largely staked out by the men and women who had left the CP during the 1950's, either out of fear of government repression or because their beliefs had been shaken by Khrushchev's revelations of the crimes committed by Stalin, or more generally because they no longer found the party an effective vehicle for the advancement of their political goals. The CP, which in 1956 had 20,000 members, mostly middle-class professionals, lost over 15,000 of them in the next two years.

Although Isserman has little enlightening to say about the political beliefs of these people, they do form a type about which generalization is possible. It is important to recognize that most of them did not abandon the core beliefs which attracted them to the party in the first place, and which had been reinforced by years of party activity. Certainly many of them thought that the American Communist party had been poorly led. Some regretted the party directives which had, during the McCarthy era, ordered many leading members underground, shattering their careers and personal lives. Others found much to criticize in the party's exuberant embrace of Stalinism, particularly now that it had been demonstrated how vicious Stalin had been to other Communists. Many undoubtedly felt sheepish over their own personal admiration of Stalin, not to mention their own failure to perceive the anti-Semitism that lay behind such affairs as the Slansky trial and the so-called “doctors' plot.”

But for a great many (the majority?) of those who left during this period, abandoning the party did not mean abandoning Marxism-Leninism. They became avid readers of such independent Marxist-Leninist journals as the National Guardian and Monthly Review. The United States, they continued to feel, was the world's main bastion of reaction and imperialism. “Bourgeois” liberties were a fraud which masked the domination of the poor by the exploitative forces of monopoly capital. The collapse of capitalism, in any case inevitable, was much to be desired. As for the Soviet Union, although no longer willing to give automatic approval to every turn in its foreign policy, the class-of-'56 ex-Communists continued to support those causes and countries in the world which they deemed “progressive” and “anti-imperialist.” More often than not, this translated into support for the very same causes and countries the Soviet Union was supporting.

This “party” of ex-Communists is described by Isserman as the “most influential adult radical group in the 1960's.” One avenue by which it left its prints upon the newer radicalism then emerging was caught by Irving Howe in a 1965 article in Dissent analyzing the political beliefs of the New Left:

Those who left the party or its supporting organizations because they feared government attack were often people who kept, semi-privately, their earlier convictions. Many of them had a good deal of political experience; some remained significantly placed in the network of what might be called conscience organizations. Naturally enough, they continued to keep in touch with one another, forming a kind of reserve apparatus based on common opinions, feelings, memories. As soon as some ferment began a few years ago in the civil-rights movement and the peace groups, these people were present, ready and eager; they needed no directives from the CP to which, in any case, they no longer (or may never have) belonged; they were quite capable of working on their own as if they were working together. Organizational Stalinism declined, but a good part of its heritage remained: people who could offer political advice, raise money, write leaflets, sit patiently at meetings. …

It is very difficult to gauge the precise extent of the influence this “adult” group exercised on the general tenor of SDS. But many SDS members did indeed come to Port Huron by way of such “conscience” organizations as SANE, or Women Strike for Peace, or from those pockets within the civil-rights movement dominated by the perspectives, and often also the personnel, of Isserman's “party” of ex-Communists. Another group which counted both at Port Huron and after was the so-called “red-diaper babies”—children of people who had recently left the CP, or in some cases children of people who had remained in it. Many of these young men and women had grown up in the CP network of summer camps and political clubs; on the surface they sometimes seemed like part of the “silent generation” of the 50's, but their “silence” was of a particularly sophisticated kind, and any group on the Left which hoped to organize the young had to attend to them.

In this connection, Isserman quotes from a fascinating memorandum by Al Haber, the non-Communist student radical who was a pre-Port Huron president of SDS, explaining to his parent organization, the LID, that while the CP itself was dead on campus, it was vital for SDS to attract students from Stalinist backgrounds; if SDS did not, others would. Haber went on to say of these students that although generally suspicious of ideology, they bristled at any criticism of the Soviet Union. SDS, therefore, should strive for a political tone which would attract the red-diaper babies while at the same time fending off any slide toward “anti-American” and “anti-democratic” attitudes within the organization. In the event, SDS would score a much greater success at attracting students from Communist backgrounds than at inoculating itself against anti-American and anti-democratic attitudes.

Isserman's book tails off into an attack on the Young People's Socialist League which seems scurrilous and is unsupported by documentation. The virulence of the attack may have something to do with the fact that YPSL, the loser in early factional wars at SDS, came to oppose the New Left in its later incarnations, and perhaps also with the fact that several former YPSL members have become neoconservatives.

In spite of this flaw, however, Isserman's work makes it possible to understand how the anti-Communists lost so quickly and so decisively in the maneuverings which determined the early shape of SDS. It is an essential corrective to the view of the early SDS common throughout much of the 60's and now reemerging from the likes of Miller and Hendrik Hertzberg—namely, that it was an organization of idealistic and politically inexperienced college students focused mainly on advancing the cause of civil rights, bringing an end to the cold war, and transcending a culture whose parameters seemed defined by Leave It to Beaver and Wonder Bread. In Isserman one finds everything left out of Hertzberg's portrayal of Port Huron as a coming-together of young men and women who “could have passed for the executive board of the Young Republicans or the Young Democrats,” everything necessary to make sense of the information in Miller's book that he himself refuses to interpret.

As it happens, of the six or eight people who played leading roles in the forging of the Port Huron Statement, and in setting the tone of the organization in its first years, several could hardly be mistaken for typical “Young Democrats” and “Young Republicans.” One, Richard Flacks (though he had in fact served as president of the Young Democrats at Brooklyn College), had been an activist in the Communist youth organization, the Labor Youth League. His wife, like him a red-diaper baby, was an activist in Women Strike for Peace. A third, Steve Max, was the son of the former editor of the Daily Worker.

This is not to suggest that, at Port Huron or after, any of these had an enduring association with the CP. Flacks, for instance, came to Port Huron as a correspondent for the National Guardian, a Marxist-Leninist publication explicitly independent of the CP. But they were certainly happy to find an organization that was opposed to anti-Communism. And in the young Tom Hayden, a Midwesterner from a Catholic background who was already a seminal force at the age of twenty, they discovered someone who could convey radical disapproval of capitalist America and still “speak American”—that is, use a language that owed nothing to the formulations of American Stalinism. Flacks perceived this instantly; when he first heard Hayden speak, in the spring of 1962, he rushed home to tell his wife, “I've just seen the next Lenin.”

Personal testimony backing up Isserman's account of the considerable power wielded by the allegedly dormant CP, particularly in New York in the late 1950's, comes from Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Like Miller and Isserman, Gitlin too was a member of SDS—indeed, he was elected president of the organization in 1963, shared an apartment with Tom Hayden, and was present at several key encounters such as the hostile meeting with the editors of Dissent described above. Later he visited and enthused over Cuba, and remained a radical activist throughout the decade. Again like Miller and Isserman, he too sees the 60's as a positive influence on American life, and he concludes his book in a decidedly partisan mode, lamenting the post-Carter conservative trend in American politics. Within the confines of this perspective, however, Gitlin has produced an impressive blend of memoir and history which is likely to disappoint anyone expecting a rosy-hued portrait of the 60's as an era of youthful idealism snuffed out by the repressive “system.”

Gitlin himself came from a liberal middle-class family, and he is particularly deft at portraying the milestones along the way of his own radicalization during the late 1950's. In his telling, the CP held, for him and for many others like him, a sort of mystique of the forbidden. He elaborates on his first love affair with a red-diaper baby (such affairs, he suggests, were important milestones for many young men who joined the New Left), and of the secret thrill of listening to The Investigator, an underground record satirizing McCarthy. (Vignettes like this serve to demonstrate once again how counterproductive it was for American politics that the Communist party was driven underground in the 50's.) To a greater extent than Miller, Gitlin emphasizes the importance of the organization's split with the democratic socialists.

Gitlin's book is particularly useful for tracing the growth of SDS into a mass organization during the mid-to-late 60's. He notes that the first sign of a large constituency for resurgent radicalism came at Berkeley in 1964, during the so-called Free Speech Movement, which preceded the emergence of Vietnam as a mobilizing issue even as it set the tone for it.

The next year, cadres from the Progressive Labor party (PL) first showed up at the SDS convention. PL was a Maoist offshoot of the CP, unusual on the Left at that time both because it was openly and explicitly Marxist-Leninist and because in the tradition of the old CP it was an organization of disciplined cadres. In many accounts of the New Left's demise, PL is assigned the role of the heavy. But as Gitlin makes painfully clear, before PL's entry, SDS had already taken care to strip itself of any possible defense against it. Having defined itself as vigorously opposed to anti-Communism, SDS had no logical reason to resist the entry of PL cadres into its ranks. At the 1965 convention, SDS president Clark Kissinger took care of the details by proposing two amendments: the first eliminated the phrasing in the SDS constitution which defined the organization as a “democratic” movement equally against “Communism” and the “domestic Right”; the second excised the SDS exclusion clause, which had prohibited membership by advocates of “totalitarian” principles. These amendments, opposed by a feeble remnant from the Young People's Socialist League and few others, were debated little, and passed without difficulty.

This evolution from anti-anti-Communism to pro-Communism did not at all stand in the way of the growth of SDS, now accelerating as college students in increasing numbers took notice of an organization which represented their opposition to the escalating Vietnam war. In the three years after 1965, SDS and the broader New Left went from one astonishing success to another. Membership soared: by 1968 there may have been 100,000 SDSers and the organization had become the largest radical group in America since the 1930's. The broader “Movement,” as it came to be called, incorporating a loose alliance of the New Left, militant blacks, and a sympathetic network of middle-aged and more established veterans of the Old Left, created its chief bastions in and around college campuses on both coasts. The Movement swam in the sea of the much larger counterculture of “the kids”—a worldwide youth movement centered on the enjoyment of drugs and rock-and-roll, and a disdain for the restrictive “straight” world of the nuclear family and professional ambition. As a whole, the Movement benefited from the support of a wide range of American intellectuals, which manifested itself in sympathetic efforts to interpret “what the kids are trying to tell us” and, just as often, in expressions of unrestrained enthusiasm and even sycophancy.

There were, however, hidden tensions between the revolutionary core and the larger mass of young people who opposed the war but were not ready to try to destroy the American government. In the Movement's inner sanctums these students were called, in a revealing mimicry of a right-wing epithet, “peace creeps”—they had not yet fully internalized the New Left's hatred of the malignant American “system,” and they were in danger of being drawn into that system by the 1968 presidential campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.

To be sure, some of the Movement's leaders themselves retained a certain ambivalence toward liberalism: when Tom Hayden, who had privately referred to Bobby Kennedy as “a little fascist,” showed up respectfully at his funeral, that ambivalence was probably as much at work in him as was the instinct for media opportunities. But generally liberalism was viewed as the Movement's worst enemy. Theories of “liberal fascism” proliferated, direct descendants of the Stalinist concept of “social fascism” mixed with gibberish derived from Herbert Marcuse about “repressive tolerance.”

The Movement also mastered the tactics of confrontation on the campuses, learning to find obscure or secondary issues as rationales to seize buildings and shout down professors and then, if the university tried to restore order, creating scenes with the police, which helped further to strengthen it. It was not long before such early rallying cries as “participatory democracy” and “free speech” had acquired Orwellian definition: by 1968 the circle of Americans deemed unfit to participate, or to speak, had widened to include any professor opposing campus disruption, any official of the U.S. government, anyone on a campus who supported the right of a student to inquire about jobs with the military, the government, or Dow Chemical (because it was the manufacturer of the napalm being used in Vietnam).

To an extent that hardly anyone could have foreseen, all this was overwhelmingly effective. On one campus after another the Movement grew not only in numbers but in moral authority. While the violence of language and of tactics was sometimes deplored, it was difficult to quarrel with success; many were the students and professors who worried that in its means the Movement might have gone too far, but who nevertheless “agreed with its aims.”

But what, finally, were those aims? Ending the war in Vietnam was of course the one most often stated, the most readily understood. But the Movement had a deeper ambition. By no later than 1965, SDS had concluded that whatever had been so mysteriously disturbing to it about America at Port Huron could now be described in a familiar term like “imperialism,” a disease which could be alleviated only through “radical social change” or, simply put, through revolution. By the mid-60's, the Movement's leaders were traveling to Cuba and North Vietnam, some lending their voices to North Vietnamese propaganda, some simply forging emotional ties with these Communist regimes, some cooperating with their intelligence agencies. By then it was obvious that the New Left's commonly expressed condescension toward the Old Left had nothing at all to do with the CP's unrestrained enthusiasm for dictatorship, but simply implied contempt for the fact that the Old Left had failed to win power and that its aging members had retreated to a kind of checkbook radicalism. Within the New Left the feeling grew that revolution was both a possibility and a moral imperative, and its leaders began to consider strategies which would lead them to victory.

Gitlin is at his best here in describing the frenetic atmosphere in the New Left as it was fed by one victory after another—the camaraderie with Castroism and “the Vietnamese,” the heady feeling that one was involved in a global process that was on the threshold of triumph. One problem remained, however. Successful as the Movement had been in controlling the terms of debate and intimidating its opponents on about twenty major college campuses, it was both tiny and increasingly detested within the nation at large. Giddy with a sense of its own achievements yet dimly conscious of the disdain in which it was held by most Americans, the New Left embarked on a search for classes and social movements possessing revolutionary potential. Both classical Marxism and the Old Left had assigned this role to the working class, and PL, by 1968 a major power within SDS, still believed in it. But in the U.S. (as elsewhere) the workers had never shown much interest; during the 60's, no group in America was more contemptuous of the New Left. So the search went on for a substitute “proletariat.”

One possibility was youth—the millions of teenagers and older hippies who participated in the counterculture. “Yippie” leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, two politically experienced “freaks,” well-known through their media antics and adept at giving political expression to counter-culture attitudes, were the most prominent partisans of this line. Hoffman's 1969 book Woodstock Nation, published as he was about to be tried for inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic convention, exhorted America's youth to reject the “pig nation” of their parents, and introduced a new set of distinctions among styles of radicalism:

When I appear in the Chicago courtroom, I want to be tried not because I support the National Liberation Front of Vietnam—which I do—but because I have long hair. Not because I support the Black Liberation Movement, but because I smoke dope. Not because I am against the capitalist system, but because I think property eats shit. Not because I believe in student power, but that the schools should be destroyed. Not because I'm against corporate liberalism, but because I think people should do whatever the fuck they want, and not because I'm trying to organize the working class, but because I think kids should kill their parents.

But while the Yippies enjoyed a large following, the intellectuals of the New Left viewed the undisciplined and basically anarchist counter-culture with considerable unease. Many of them looked instead for the substitute proletariat in the Black Panthers and other “Third World revolutionaries,” armed political groups whose members were usually recruited in the prison system. Out of this admiration for those who were “picking up the gun” came the underground terrorist offshoot from SDS known as Weatherman.

It has become customary, among latter-day apologists for the New Left, to treat Weatherman as an aberration—a temporary and alien insanity inexplicably visited upon the idealistic “kids.” Gitlin's incisive demonstration of how the Weatherman choice flowed logically and inexorably from the Movement's own perspectives is a necessary antidote to this fiction.

It was Weatherman that perceived that cheering for armed Third World revolutionaries from the sidelines had a hollow ring. It was Weatherman that sensed the hypocrisy of relying on the Black Panthers, then in the midst of discovering that the police had more firepower than they did. And it was Weatherman that saw through the fantasy of the youth culture, which was enjoying itself too much to think of political action. “The duty of revolutionaries is to make revolution,” as the saying goes, and Weatherman appointed itself not only the vanguard but the agent of revolution.

At the famous national conference of SDS in 1969, Weatherman and its allies expelled PL for being “objectively anti-Communist” (sic) and then marched out, 700 strong, chanting “victory to people's war,” determined to put into practice a moral and political perspective that the Movement had been nurturing for years.

As Gitlin relates, Weatherman contained many of the brightest and most charismatic figures within SDS, indeed within the whole New Left: articulate, good-looking, graduates of elite universities, products (like other revolutionaries who have succeeded in our hemisphere) of upper-class homes. In contrast to Progressive Labor, Weatherman had style and sported a faintly self-mocking sense of humor. Like the early SDS, it too “spoke American”: members liked to sing, to the tune of White Christmas, “I'm dreaming of a white riot,” and, from the opening song in West Side Story, “When you're a red, you're a red all the way, from your first party cell till your class takes the state.” They were well-known to many others in the Movement; some had been organizers in poor neighborhoods, others had been campus radicals who had not only participated in disturbances but had planned and led them. Many were accomplished public speakers, and were practiced in dealing with the straight media. They were, in effect, Movement stars, and when in 1969 they went underground and began to riot and bomb in earnest, the rest of the Left looked on with a certain alarm but also with awe and fascination.

Leninism had been commonplace in SDS since about 1967. It was after all a natural ideology for the SDS elite, for it spoke to the Movement's grudging awareness of its unpopularity once one got away from its enclaves in Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and the Upper West Side of New York, and it provided a rationale for that unpopularity as well as a justification for a vanguard party. But Weatherman also absorbed the newer styles of revolutionary thought, such as that developed by Frantz Fanon, the popular theorist of Third World revolution. Fanon stressed the liberating effect of violence on the psyche of those who perpetrated it. For Weatherman this proved a way to break the psychic bonds of “white skin privilege.” Weatherman leader Mark Rudd expressed it this way: “It's a wonderful feeling to hurt a pig; it must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.”

The denouement came quickly. There were, inspired or carried out by Weatherman, over 250 bombings between September 1969 and May 1970. The climax occurred in a New York town house in March 1970, when an anti-personnel bomb studded with roofing nails, apparently intended for Columbia University, blew up before it could be placed at its destination. Three of the Weatherman vanguard died, others staggered out of the rubble and, for a time, disappeared. This marked the symbolic close of the venture begun at Port Huron. Shortly thereafter a rock-and-roll festival at Altamont turned into a death dance, closing down the fantasy of the hip counterculture.

Political defeats in American life are seldom final. Those members of Weatherman who resurfaced in the late 1970's received gentle wrist pats from the judiciary, as did Abbie Hoffman, who had been caught selling cocaine. More recently Mark Rudd returned from Nicaragua to Columbia University, his alma mater, and announced that he no longer felt power was a “realistic short-term goal.” The event provided material for a pleasant nostalgia story in the press. So too did Abbie Hoffman's return to “direct action,” this time in league with Amy Carter, as they led a group trying to prevent students at the University of Massachusetts from talking to CIA recruiting officers. The timing seemed uncanny: Ronald Reagan drifts into political senescence and the 60's spring back to life.

But the reaction to these latest events, particularly among established liberal opinion leaders, suggests that something besides nostalgia is in the air. Mary McGrory of the Washington Post took the occasion of the Abbie-Amy action to denounce the “galloping apathy of campus youth” and to acclaim “at last a committed college student.” This is by now a commonplace theme: one would not be surprised by a call for congressional hearings to investigate campus complacency. Miss McGrory and her colleagues have even refused to be consoled by the long list of public figures—Caspar Weinberger, Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Edén Pastora, among them—who have been effectively barred from speaking on campus by the staged disruptions of today's college Left.

Of course it is hardly among liberals alone that one senses a palpable hunger for a new generation of radicals. The ecumenically socialist In These Times and the Communist Political Affairs have both published articles hailing the revival of left-wing student activism, although in each case the information contained within has been rather sparse. In a recent talk celebrating the old CP, Richard Flacks, once a significant figure in bridging the Old Left to the New, digressed to announce that in the 90's, the children of the 60's radicals would give the Left the same sort of boost that his own generation of red-diaper babies had provided thirty years before. It is a plausible hypothesis.

This yearning for a new generation of leftists, misty among liberals, more focused on the Left, may account for the astonishing response earlier this year to the death in Nicaragua of Benjamin Linder, one of thousands of young Americans who have served the Sandinista regime. A “true American idealist” is how the Washington Post Magazine referred to Linder in its cover story on him; elsewhere he was described as a “peace-corps type,” and (by Post columnist Richard Cohen) as a “dreamer trying to bring a little light to a dark corner of the world.” One had to search more diligently to find that before going to Nicaragua Linder had been a founder of the University of Washington chapter of CISPES, an organization developed through consultations of the Communist parties of the United States and El Salvador to build American support for a Communist victory in the latter country; his family had a long history of activism in Old Left organizations.

It may be that those celebrating Linder's kind of commitment are on to something about the coming shape of the Left. There is already much rustling about the “sandalistas” as a cadre for a revived radicalism, and a book called Yankee Sandinistas⁵ profiles a handful of them. Paul Rice, a former student at Yale, identified by the Village Voice as Linder's best friend, may be the most dynamic. Beginning in the 1970's with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (whose chairman was Michael Harrington), he moved steadily leftward. First he traveled to China, but was deeply disappointed with the tentative liberalization process then under way and regretted the drift from hard-core Maoism. By the time he returned to the United States, convinced that China was betraying the masses, the cause of Nicaragua beckoned him southward. There he now lives; he serves on the block committees, engages in “economic research” for the Sandinista government, and undergoes military training, looking forward to the defeat of the contras so he can return home to “fight imperialism.”

From an initial flirtation with moderate socialism, to the embrace of ever more uncompromising versions of Third World Marxism-Leninism, Rice's path is strikingly reminiscent of the 60's. Whether his is the kind of stance that will dominate “the next Left” as thoroughly as it did the last two is an interesting question. Two recent books, representing distinct and even opposing visions of the future of the American Left, may help answer that question, as much in how they have been received as in what they say.

Michael Harrington's The Next Left⁶ is infused, like all his work, with a dogged faith that history is on the side of democratic socialism, and it offers a number of reformist proposals to help history reach that goal. It says volumes about today's Left, however, that Harrington's book has been received in its precincts with polite yawns—this, despite the fact that in recent years as the co-chairman of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) he has learned to soft-pedal the fierce anti-Stalinism which led him to cross swords with the New Left at Port Huron twenty-five years ago. (Indeed, a recent DSA forum on American foreign policy featured Harrington flanked by representatives of the Sandinistas and the African National Congress, neither group known for its commitment to democratic socialism.) Harrington may still be interested in socialist strategies to stem the collapse of the American rustbelt and to promote greater equality, but on today's Left, the energy flows into causes like “anti-imperialism,” which are about something else altogether.

Just what they are about is given muscular theoretical exposition in Mike Davis's Prisoners of the American Dream,⁷ a book that is in part a polemic against Harrington and the strategy of trying to build a socialist rump within the Democratic party. In those journals of the far Left that are read by liberals, such as the Nation and the Village Voice, Davis's book (unlike Harrington's) has been greeted alternately with deferential disagreement and wild enthusiasm.

Davis describes himself as “fairly typical of the cohort of the 1960's New Left: first immersion in the mass civil-rights movement (CORE), followed by antiwar work (SDS and Communist party), then by a considerable stint within the trade-union opposition.” Actually, the Communist-party interlude is hardly typical, but the early chapters of his book are intended to support a proposition that SDS intuited twenty-five years ago: the American industrial working class cannot be relied upon by the Left as an agent of revolution. Davis, however, has gone beyond this insight to arrive at a position essentially similar to that of Weatherman before it went underground. The centerpiece of that position involves a prospective alliance of non-white Americans and Third World revolutionaries, all taking their marching orders from white Leninists.

To be sure, the dream of a black “vanguard” is not a new one; it was popular in both Old and New Left circles during the 60's. But the rise in America's Hispanic population has given it a fresh twist: the “real weak link in the domestic base of American imperialism,” Davis proclaims, “is a black and Hispanic working class, fifty million strong. This is the nation within a nation, society within a society, that alone possesses the numerical and positional strength to undermine the American empire from within.” In tandem with the Communist resurgence in Central America, this “nation within a nation” can act to bring “socialism” to North America “by virtue of a combined hemispheric process of revolt that overlaps boundaries and interlaces movements.”

Davis admits that there are difficulties with his scenario. A big one is the “weakness of any national black (or Hispanic) socialist cadre.” Yet he does offer the far Left a comprehensive strategy which it has not had since the New Left's collapse (as well as a theoretical basis for support of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, the single electoral movement for which Davis evinces any enthusiasm).

Thus far there is no sign of a rise in the memberships of left-wing organizations, and no reason to think that a decisive bloc of the American people would be interested in the kind of “radical social change” entertained by the far Left. On the other hand, there was also little sign in the early 60's that a movement like the New Left would assume the mass proportions that it did, and such symptoms as there were (primarily, the numbers of young people attracted to the civil-rights movement) have their counterparts today in the energies mobilized around the cause of disarmament or the campaigns to protest American policy in Central America and toward South Africa. Moreover, the American Left now has much greater influence at the centers of power than it did during the early 60's, when there was nothing in Washington to rival today's small rump of Congressmen who raise money for and give political legitimacy to groups supporting the Communist insurgency in El Salvador and the Communist government in Nicaragua.

The Left could also benefit from the possibility, still very latent, of a generational change of climate. It has been noted (by Robert Nisbet) that boredom is a powerful and underestimated factor in creating the conditions for social upheaval; the chances that a new generation will be attracted to the spirit of the 60's simply because it was a time of confrontation and excitement cannot be considered low. Nor, given the proclivity of so many shapers of opinion to equate youthful idealism with service to left-wing causes, should we be surprised if any new generational ferment is channeled in a leftist direction. If so, there is every reason to expect that its ideological trajectory will follow the same path, from the lofty rhetoric of idealism to the murderous politics of Leninism, that was traced by the radicals of the 60's, over whom so much nostalgic sentiment is now being expressed.

Notes

1. Reviewed in Commentary by Tod Lindberg, May 1987.

2. Simon & Schuster, 431 pp., ＄19.95.

3. Basic Books, 288 pp., ＄18.95.

4. Bantam Books, 512 pp., ＄24.95.

5. By Ron Ridenour, Curbstone Books, 160 pp., ＄9.95 (paper).

6. Reviewed in Commentary by Larry D. Nachman, August 1987.

7. Verso, 320 pp., ＄24.95.