THE NEW LEFT: A DISEASEFOR OUR TIME
Nathan, George
T l i e N e w L e f t : A D i s e a s e F o r O u r T i m e by George Nathan Contemporary symptoms indicate Liberalism is suffering cultural ataxia, leaving the N e w Left as diseased...
...They will kick her in the shins, ignore her entreaties, but always return to her cushiony breasts for legal solace...
...As the industrial era, in America, draws to an end, America, its regnant philosophy (Liberalism) and its vast middle-class are boimd to imdergo drastic social change, perhaps revolution...
...But we are not on the frontier of Elysian serenity...
...Until the Committee on Truth in Packaging investigates their claims, I fear I cannot buy their sausage, for what is new about relativism, collectivism, permissivism, dilettanteism and prehistoric Marxist gurus...
...Did not the famous Boston Five (Spock, Coffin, Ferber, Goodman and Raskin) publicly counsel draft evasion as characterized by Coffin's declaration, "we hereby publicly counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces...
...I read of Everett Dirksen, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace plucking at Liberalism from one direction while Dr...
...In fact Kenneth Keniston, in his authoritative white wash...
...The N e w Left, because it is responding to the past rather than anticipating the future (its humor as expressed in Hair and by the Yippies satirizes an America that has not existed for twenty years), is already worthy of lodging in history's trophy case...
...Yet, though apparent that Liberalism will soon romp with the archangels, we are not to conclude that all leftist thought will perish...
...Perplexed by the quality of life pop culture has left them, m y guess is that they long for a system of values, the enrichment of tradition, the exhilaration of individual freedom, purpose transcending materialism, dignity, truth, maybe even God . But, alas, they cannot overcome their environment . . . they are too stupid...
...The New Left, an excresence of America's great middle class, holds an essentially wombistic view of America...
...Suffering perpetual cerebral diaper rash, the N e w Left fusses and frets, but represents nothing more than the illiterate conscience of a philosophy in decline...
...For from whence have emerged America's revolutionary vanguard...
...Such acute cultural deprivation could have baneful effects even on a person of m y strong moral character...
...Before his splendid days at Columbia I suspect Mark Rudd's closest brush with violence was a ferocious struggle with an inflamed pimple or in the back seat of the family's Oldsmobile...
...When the programs of the Yapping Left are not Old Left retreads, they are confused or non-existent...
...Devoutly I have poured over the Sunday N e w York Times...
...Fortified with a strong infusion of embarrassingly middleclass Puritanism, its gnomes sniff a little immorality in the Pentagon, impurity in the State Department and, in their moralistic zeal, see the ruthless grape tycoons of Delano, California as a threat to hiunanity...
...As their parents are generally (even Keniston admits it) drippy Liberals, their entire lives have been one unbroken seminar in Liberalism...
...It was there that I read about His Holiness Eugene McCarthy's excommunication of Hubert Humphrey ( A D A lifetime rating 9 8 % ) . Tearfully, the Times watched the thalidomide intellectuals of the N e w Politics' slash their umbilical cords from the A D A . Dismayed, it chronicled Daniel Patrick Moynihan embarking on an ideological odyssey toward the forbidden lands of Richard Nixon...
...he even desecrates the Democratic National Convention...
...They adjudge the N e w Left an increate, singular, revolutionary salvation army, no more closely related, ideologically, to the Old Left than to the Elks...
...Even a lame brain like Rennie Davis will weary, become frustrated, feel deserted and aspire to a certitude like destruction...
...H o m o primadonnsis, whose most adhesive commitment is to the rigors of coimtry club frolics and dancing school...
...Eldridge Cleaver and Rt...
...Ah, yes, here is where the great revolution spawned, at back yard swimming pools, in the haunting shadows of Daddy's barbecue pit...
...They have meticulously attuned themselves to every social tremor quivering across the land...
...Their reliance on authoritarianism was a familiar recourse for prehensile N e w Dealers like Harry Hopkins and General Hugh Johnson...
...Nathan judgment that the N e w Left swings from Liberalism's family tree...
...They can no more conceive performance of an autopsy on Liberalism than accept the Reverend Geo...
...And did not this gallant quintet, when the heat was on, scurry to constitutional refuge at the loving breast of the very same mother upon w h o m they earlier had heaped their ineffable abuse...
...T o m Hayden, Rev...
...The enlightened darlings and their gurus see America as an indulgent, tear-streaked mother...
...And the other five per cent are but the diseased organisms of Liberalism...
...Its truths have suffered thirty years of erosion...
...and in its residue of gravel and red clay one can barely grow weeds...
...But are America's mini-Guevaras worthy of adult America's troubled meditations...
...And, S D S ' prescription for the ills of free enterprise is nothing more than a nightmare edition of Dr...
...They listen to Huntley and Brinkley . . . They are Informed, and, natch, they dismiss m y conclusion as Uninformed...
...Mark Rudd's manager was that cruelly depressed area, Maple Wood, N e w Jersey...
...The salons of Greenwich Village...
...David Dellinger festered on it from another...
...Yet from those weekly readings I received m y first tip-off to Liberalism's unease...
...Thus he profanes those tabernacles of Liberalism, the universities, which he loathes — for they have proffered him nothing but eroded truths and unanswered questions...
...T l i e N e w L e f t : A D i s e a s e F o r O u r T i m e by George Nathan Contemporary symptoms indicate Liberalism is suffering cultural ataxia, leaving the N e w Left as diseased Liberalism's last spasming extremity...
...Provincial education like this naturally leads to unfulfilled philosophic yearnings, moral idiocy and adherence to a value system that is at best stylistic...
...Olympus...
...Adult America need not contort its brow over what radicals are saying...
...They see it pollinating in the academies, overgrowing the media, nourishing the luminaries of our generation and even affixing itself to the fads of the suburban middle class...
...Even Liberaldom's farm teams at Columbia, Harvard and Chicago report unpleasant disturbances...
...I doubt it...
...True revolution must approximate more than a spasming past...
...Computers and electronic technology are conducing America into a technecratic society...
...For gestation and implementation of a program demands intelligence which Colonel Cohn-Bendit in this magnum (Continued on Page 9) 8 . '^<UH*H4f ^cufdett wad, dUctutened wfus/p^aed in i4AMiddlUta, clotkei, . opus, has shown woefully missing from his repertory of Divine Gifts...
...Intoning witless asininities like "do your own thing," those of the N e w Left manifest the same relativism as Schlesinger I. A n d when they bastinado computers, fertilize poor old Grayson Kirk's carpet and reenact the Berlin siege on campuses across the country they are merely enacting the logical denouement of relativism — namely, mindless nihilism...
...Here, in the ranchtype jungles, Spockean inspired mothers have procreated mankind's most advanced form...
...Oh, but, many will respond pish posh and pooh pooh, for America's philosophical sea slugs accept as a certitude that Liberalism flourishes from sea to shining sea...
...U h . . . no . . . T o m m y Hayden was discovered wrapped in swaddling clothes among the sheep and asses of Royal Oak, Michigan...
...Hope springs eternal, and many of the supermarket republic's leading butchers are offering us the N e w Left's baloney as the newest stuff...
...Their crusade against capitalism is hardly new, a confused German ne'er-do-well laimched it over a century ago...
...He wages guerilla warfare against the system...
...Yet the N e w Left's incivism was prefigured by their environment as they are the benighted products of cultural ghettoes...
...Young Radicals, reports that these crazed darlings generally are bred in the suburbs of middle- and upper-middle class where permissivism has become a fetish...
...Rather than ponder the idiotic gabble of the Rudds, Haydens and Rubins, civilized America, even adult America, might better consider why they are saying it...
...Yet their great awakening is hopeless, they are not revolutionary, they are not portentous, they are not profound...
...Ninety-five per cent of them are mere faddists like the imbeciles who swallowed goldfish in the twenties or voted for Stevenson in the fifties...
...Well, perhaps, but then I have spent six informative years at liberalism's knee, memorizing the N e w Deal's catechism and bearing the Gospel of Keynes in m y bosom...
...Recently, that eminent cosmopolitan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in Obsolete Communism, continuously dismissed any thought of a program as antique, mysterious, impure and, may I add, beyond his exiguous capabilities...
...What they are is as hypocritical as their parents though less cultivated, as faddish as the raccoon coat, and just a little reactionary...
...Yet a revolution advancing program derived from the past and offering no program for the future is counter-revolutionary...
...Certainly Liberalism is unwell — and its condition worsens...
...Galbraith's aging dream of comfy collectivism...
...The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
Vol. 2 • May 1969 • No. 5
