The Radical Left
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The Radical Left Edited by Gerberding and Smith Houghton Mifflin Co, $8.95 While reading this book be cautious how you rest it on your lap, for certain essays may slop out. In fact, you would be...
...As Searle points out, their solicitude for "reformed education" does not issue from the heart...
...In their introduction, the editors tell us they are taking "the new radicals seriously but looking with a skeptical eye...
...Lasky, the editor of the British intellectual journal, Encounter, conveys the idealism of traumatized children and the, great expectations of those jejune European intellectuals who seem to long for excitement that comes only from monumental events like world wars...
...sound analysis may proceed from here...
...Even when poked at and pondered on, the New Left's adumbrations of Utopia are neither terribly interesting nor sub-stantively stimulating, but their inspirations for and methods of ushering in Utopia are interesting...
...Ultimately, a variation of Gresham's Law affects the book (much as it regulates discourse in our great republic...
...Mario Savio admitted after Berkeley's glorious revolution that the issue of "free speech" was a "pretext" to incite students...
...To them, he was a thug and a gangster, and they based their conclusions not on his program for the future, but on his current activity...
...In fact, you would be wise to place it on a level table while reading it, lest some of the soupier essays run onto your lap and ruin your clothing...
...Apparently sensitive to this ambiguity, the editors subtly beg exculpation by stating: "One of the reasons for the difficulty of describing the contours of the new radicalism is the refusal of its adherents to spell out their ideological goals with any degree of precision...
...Gerberding and Smith's essays do not...
...R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr...
...Gerberding and Smith show a healthy disgust with the New Left and with much of The West's Zeitgeist that encouraged the New Left's growth...
...And Nathan Glazer's doubts about the New Left are irrefragable...
...yet they are themselves afflicted with some of the radicals' hallucinations-most especially when they mention Vietnam...
...But, from here we move into the turbid final essays written by the editors, who, perhaps in a moment of waggishness, have separated their two essays with a burlesque by none other than Professor Eric Sevareid...
...The fact that David Dellinger says America is an imperialist aggressor does not make it so...
...In the final essays Messrs...
...His second essay on the "American Race Paradox" complements James Q. Wilson's thoughtful essay - especially his discussion of America's complicated pattern of group life...
...When the smoke cleared from Columbia, Mark Rudd must have punctured the illusions of a lot of doting Liberals when he asserted that "we manufactured the issues...
...But Messrs...
...Perhdps, unevenness was inevitable for the segment of America's Liberal intellectual communityfrom which the bulkof these essays derive is in a well nurtured chrysalis...
...After reading their manifestos, the civilized man cannot help wondering how the European manages to walk upright...
...Such dunderheads would benefit only marginally by reading John R. Searle's excellent essay (and let us now turn to those essays banished by Gresham's Law), "A Foolproof Scenario for Student Revolution...
...Though other intellectuals may compete with Kristol's eloquence and knowledge, few will approach his wisdom...
...Edward Banfield and Herbert McClosky try to shed some light on how the American Frankenstein has managed to survive these two hundred years, concluding that America's political system is not nearly so monstrous as the New Left would have us believe...
...Even Sidney Hook's incisive "The Prospects of the Academy" fails to redeem this section...
...Because jeremiads resound from the New Politics crowd about forty million Americans going to bed hungry every night is not cause for declaring a national state of emergency and turning the Department of Defense into a bakery...
...The New Left is composed of miscreants and revolutionaries, and while not complex, this description is accurate and comprehensive...
...They were armed for chipmunk when they should have been prepared for weasel...
...There is an essay by Irving Kristol (whose serene awareness is always so refreshing) which raises the question of a society's need for "values" so gently yet so challengingly that I considered the matter manfully without any fears for my libertarian purity...
...The soundest essays in this collection manifest the first tendencies...
...The Radical Left is not very well put together...
...Many of the book's essays do proceed from this understanding, and readers will find these essays intelligent and helpful...
...The effluvium of contemporary western thought has sickened them to the point that there simply is not much else worth doing...
...They seem to recognize his tracks, and they hold a desultory discussion of the mark he has left, but their mention of his characteristics never gets very specific...
...Burkean Whigs, or prosopopoeias of the old Federalism, while others are simply malingering in befuddlement...
...Throughout the remainder of the book, you will have difficulty finding an intelligent line...
...Without a more precise description of the New Left on which to base their discussion, the editors' brief sketch of the purposes for pursuing the New Left seemed remote, and consequently the book lacked focus...
...Their inspirations are grievance and ululation, and the tyoical New Leftist suffers a perpetual case of cerebral diaper rash...
...Obviously, there is something wrong with that eye, for the editors never do locate their proclaimed quarry, the new radical...
...Another fine contribution to this collection is Melvin J. Lasky's moving "Revolution Diary...
...It is lamentably uneven, with trivial essays protruding from the sound essays and slippery analysis sliding throughout the text...
...but then their New World equivalents are not always terribly successful at impersonating the Homo sapiens either...
...Their contributions are weak and fuzzy - though eloquent in expressing why the intellectuals are so often ensnared by New Left rhetoric and immobilized by New Left tactics...
...Alphonso Capone was lackadaisical about spelling out his "ideological goals with any degree of precision...
...Still, one cannot expect meliorists to exchange their dulcet fancies for grim reality, and there still remains a mob of educators and politicos whose nostrum is "dialogue" or some other euphemism for irresolution...
...He chafes at the world probably because he is A) bored, B) ill-informed and C) typically American...
...The New Left has been most forthright about its yearning for confrontation...
...that is to say, the second-rate blowzerisms tend to drive out the first-rate ideas...
...yet students of his career had little difficulty in describing him...
...Well, now this difficulty would naturally hinder any writer, but it need not cause paralysis...
...So as I stated at the outset this is a weak book, the product of an evolving school of thought...
...Lasky eloquently portrays the infantilism of the revolutionary conformists in Europe during the 1968 season, reminding us of the juvenescence of the magnificos in the media and on embattled university faculties...
...Moreover their inspirations and their methods are determining factors of their movement...
...Some are emerging as libertarians...
...Today's New Leftists see the university purely as a breeding ground for revolution, and the Achilles' heel of liberal democracy...
...After all, Mr...
...The New Left finds problems in America because it wants to find problems in America, and it wants to find problems because it wants to overturn society...
...Almost the entire section on students and the universities is second-rate, and its authors rise only occasionally from their fatuous misrenderings of the students' plight to palm off an embarrassing banality...
...Had the editors possessed a more profound knowledge of their subject they might have included essays by Bruno Bettelheim, James Burnham, Frank Meyer or Robert Nisbet - though I suspect such essays would bring perspiration to their hat bands...
...What some of the soundest writers in this collection (men such as Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer) know so well and what the editors must realize, is that the New Left utterly renounces every vestige of Liberal democracy...
...The editors manifest this change most dramatically, and I shall remember them in my prayer chamber...
...The sloppier are stultified by confusion and diffidence...
...That Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis have been negligent about presenting a prospectus for their post-Amerika America is hardly worth meditating on when a mob of misanthropes begin torching the library...
...I was never convinced that they understood the creature they were stalking, and their competence remained a mystery to me until the last two essays when it became apparent that these hunters of the New Left had brought the wrong equipment...
...And in The Radical Left, the half-baked thoughts have prevailed over the intelligent entries, for the book's editors are not quite clear about the New Left and have ignored important considerations while including whole chapters of essays only tangentially significant to the discussion of the New Left...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
