Political Passages
Bunzel, John H.
V very once in a while, I am prone to second thoughts: maybe I overreacted to the sixties; maybe my deep and abiding hatred of the New Left, the counterculture, and the age of Aquarius in all its...
...How did the contributors to Michael Novak considers himself a Political Passages accomplish this Whig, which is his way of identifying transition to naivete...
...They never really believed in anything...
...The opposite of "authenticity" was "false consciousness," and the way you escaped from the hell of the latter to the bliss of the former was by getting your consciousness "raised" through the "Movement...
...And had finally made the breakthrough in- when Julius Lester, a black writer, is to freedom and authenticity, they ex- advised by friends to leave his wife perienced a sense of rebirth, of view- because she is white, and his children ing the world through a new pair of because they are half-white, his eyes, that seems not unlike a religious deradicalization begins...
...ly mine...
...But as Martha Bayles, now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, rightly points out, for her and many of her coevals the sixties was a time of wrenching uncertainty and inner turmoil...
...She eventually found a model of legitimate authority in a conservative rural community of Southern blacks...
...John Bunzel still consciousness, it turns out, is by thinks of himself as a liberal, albeit a knocking the left's ideological stuffing conservative liberal who "cares as out of one's head and (to borrow a much for freedom as I do about equaliphrase from non-contributor Werner ty...
...I will die," he conversion...
...I will reach for my copy of Political Passages, the splendid collection of autobiographical essays edited by Hoover Institution fellow John Bunzel, and open it to Bunzel's own account of his ordeal as a professor at San Francisco State University during the sixties...
...This Oedipal revolt was carried on, of course, in the name of liberation, both personal and political...
...The biggest Bunzel's volume regard themselves as change in me," he writes, "is not any part of the left anymore...
...Julius a key role...
...David Horowitz is now a "conserDannhauser) "becoming naive again...
...family which made Peter Collier "draw Once the denizens of the New Left back from the radical brink...
...In changing the world, I found removing general, it seems, family responsibithe furry blinders worn through my lities and loyalties tend to temper left-wing youth an immense aid . . . ideological enthusiasms, which may the world seems a livelier, a brighter, help to explain why the Catholic clergy an altogether more interesting place...
...Yet what all these 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988...
...Peter Collier, a former editor of the influential New Left journal THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 45 makes the following revealing comment impossible...
...Still, Miss Bayles was luckier than many...
...Certainly by the end of the decade their commitment was negative: they were against patriotic commitment...
...perilous journey through the wilder-voice of those essays is not authentical- of Aquarius...
...vative"—someone who respects the "accumulated wisdom of human tradition" and distrusts mere reason...
...As Joseph Epstein puts it, says, "before my 'consciousness' is "As a writer, someone primarily in- 'raised' to the place where I consider terested in understanding and not these children sins to be repented...
...maybe the historian of the future, disinterested and wise, will judge the sixties more kindly and justly than I can ever aspire to...
...Bunzel's essay is one of the twelve contributions by men and women of varied ages and temperaments who were all either liberal, progressive, or far left in their politics during the sixties and seventies, and who have since changed their minds...
...When next I am assailed by these mellow reconsiderations, I know exactly what I will do...
...And Joseph Epvaunted sixties culture," writes Joseph stein must surely be a neocon—what Epstein...
...Authenticity entailed casting off the trammels of conventional bourgeois society and getting in touch with your true Self...
...What we called politics in the sixties was exactly what Lewis Feuer and many of our political elders tried to say it was before we shouted them down—an Oedipal revolt on a grand scale...
...This is the best description of what the struggle for authenticity really means that I have ever come across—and, as Miss Iannone makes clear, it was a lonely struggle that she had to wage against the New Left...
...is currently much more radical than the David Horowitz, another former Ram- laity...
...Have you...
...But sympathetic adults (oh, how I despised those endlessly sympathetic adults...
...To have teenage children in individuals have in common is a corn- grant you, but good, solid fare—just about the essays he wrote as a colum- one's charge during those years gave a mitment to democracy, civility, and— what is needed after a long and nist for the New Leftist Guardian: "The whole new, sour perspective on the age for lack of a better word—normality...
...istic liberal" who believed that the principal duty of government is to promote greater equality...
...Carol Iannone, a writer and editor who went through the full catastrophe—radicalism, feminism, even orgone therapy— puts it this way: "What the sixties were to become for me, though I did not recognize it at first, was an intense internal struggle to possess my own soul against the traps of pseudothought...
...Professor Bunzel was a liberal...
...This comes through time and again in these essays...
...Ramparts makes short shrift of this moonshine: "Most of the radicals I knew were, at least by the middle of their journey, confirmed cynics...
...The irony of all this was that the people who prattled most about authenticity were the least authentic of human beings, the ones most urgently in need of "consciousness raising...
...The eminent philosopher and social critic, Michael Novak, makes the same point somewhat differently...
...If I had been twenty-six, Lester shuns all labels—and as a recent unmarried, without responsibilities, I black convert to Judaism, he does in-might have loved every moment of the deed seem sui generic...
...more, he was a "collectivJoseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.C...
...instead of providing her with the authority she so desperately—if unconsciously—sought, "mistook my plummeting for free flight," and urged her on...
...Other leftists, not so lucky, found their role-models in a criminal organization like the Black Panthers, in a ruthless Stalinist like Ho Chi Minh, or in a political psychopath like Fidel Castro...
...And Julius Lester, one-time buddy of Stokely Carmichael, POLITICAL PASSAGES: JOURNEYS OF CHANGE THROUGH TWO DECADES, 1968-1988 Edited by John H. Bunzel/The Free Press/$21.95 Joseph Shattan onsider, for starters, the claim which was repeated ad nauseam throughout this period—and is still heard even today—that the youthful protesters of the sixties were the most idealistic generation America has ever produced...
...It was also Marx who said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce—which seems like a good way of distinguishing between the Old Left and the New...
...But far from shielding him against attack, it was Bunzel's very liberalism, his egalitarianism and activism, that made him a prime target of radical thuggery...
...Next to "idealism," the most overworked cliche of the sixties was "authenticity...
...But while they new political conclusions I may have...
...they hated the idea of America...
...Bunzel's intent, I believe, was simply to provide a personalized chronicle of a dark and troubled chapter in American history...
...On the contrary, the responses Bunzel got, along with an extraordinarily perceptive introductory essay by the redoubtable Edward Shils, constitute the most effective indictment of the politics and culture of the sixties (actually, of the period between 1965, when the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley, and 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in the wake of Watergate) that I know of...
...Bunzel asked each of his contributors—many of whose names will be familiar to readers of this journal—to explain what drew them leftwards in the first place, and how they ultimately came to their current positions...
...But the result is not just another more or less interesting group portrait...
...But not my age but having else could a regular Commentary con-two stepsons in their teens made this tributor possibly be...
...maybe my deep and abiding hatred of the New Left, the counterculture, and the age of Aquarius in all its sordid and pretentious rottenness derives not from objective reality, but from what my wife is pleased to call my "authoritarian personality...
...all of them have disembarked at exact-The real way to attain a higher state of ly the same station...
...have all gotten off the train by now, not It is a new way of looking at things...
...Similarly, it was his These are not earthshaking values, I ness...
...Reading about the outrages to which Bunzel was subjected is enough to rekindle my old ferocity against the New Left, and I feel a rush of sympathy for the aging Karl Marx, who, when informed by H. M. Hyndman that he (Hyndman) had grown more tolerant with advancing age, scornfully replied, "Have you...
...parts editor, echoes Epstein's sense of Today, none of the contributors to newly found freedom...
...Underneath this questioning . . . of my own left-wing presuppositions," he writes, "lay a pursuit of self-knowledge, a drive to be faithful to my family and my roots, to be myself1---in short, to become authentic...
...There I was," she writes of her New Left days, "a young woman in emotional and cultural free fall...
...a no-fault acting out...
...For many of with a political tradition that is at once them, concern for their families played conservative and progressive...
Vol. 21 • July 1988 • No. 7
