The "New Radicalism" The Kids And The Cockers
Bazelon, David T.
In our last issue we began a discussion of the "new radicalism" with articles by Irving Howe and Staughton Lynd. That discussion now continues with the following articles, as well as some letters...
...You liked the old one better...
...What primitives...
...which unfortunately succeeded far beyond our worst fears...
...Or were they just getting it out of their system...
...The one event was unavoidable...
...They should be criticized with cutting kindness, as benign as one can manage...
...Don't worry, fellows: we may not live to see it, but these kids will stumble into their own set of pieties, when the time comes...
...And maybe they will in fact be the first generation to experience nothing but moral triumphs, with no necessity for learning the uses of practicality...
...One that we were raised to believe Marx had laid low long ago...
...My golden hair has turned white, And I am on the brink of ruin...
...It has to be in part our fault that after two thousand years their best idea of political action is a Central High rendition of the Sermon on the Mount...
...the other could have been handled somewhat better...
...But the big difference remains that we had the European tradition of socialism—which perhaps could have been adequately modified and made relevant, instead of alternately enshrined and abandoned...
...The incredible idealism...
...In this, they will be quintessentially American-asusual...
...That figures...
...This was accomplished through strenuous intellectual effort...
...It wasn't, because of the same impulse toward purity (covering over analytical ineptitude) that may be observed now...
...Note that the Great Events at Berkeley represented, at most, a revolt against a particular style of administration by a particular group of young administrators-in-training...
...They come from the pacifist tradition, and other remnants of Christian idealism...
...I don't know what to do about it: they won't listen...
...Idealism is a device of self-creation appropriate to young people who are in the heat of the process of creating themselves...
...Piety, however, is an ideal self-protective device for cockers who didn't manage the self-creation of their youth as well as they intended...
...Suckers for another Popular Front gangshag...
...My sharp preference is for practicality among idealists, and idealism when living with the practical people...
...so also did the virus of doctrinal distinctions work its way in our poor battered brains...
...Beginning with the Bomb as the fundamental fact of life, rather than economic exploitation or other elements of Marxism (as we did), the new fellows come upon this item called "Communism" merely as a manufactured road-block: many of them heard about it first from McCarthy...
...Also, a good part of what we would offer them they need like another hole in the head...
...On the other hand, their vital foolishness should not be taken as a second chance for us to be young again...
...On the other hand, so is DisSENT— which is also, admit it, even a bit of a comedown from the early Partisan Review...
...Even if they do not reach the top of that mountain, we can continue our efforts to ensure that they will not fall too low—will never sing the song of the Russian labor camps, where twenty million died in twenty years: They finished me, bastards, they finished me, They destroyed my youth...
...What was for us a monumental historical tragedy, is for them a rhetorical inconvenience...
...You betcha...
...The intellectual life of the cockers was initiated or focused by socialist writings, confirmed either by the October Revolution or by the Depression...
...Notice that mere moral assertiveness has been effective in fighting segregation and was inevitable in opposing the Bomb, since nothing much else was available — certainly nothing in the socialist tradition...
...This could be a serious loss, each in their own way, for both the kids and the cockers...
...We flubbed that opportunity...
...The youth are not to be opposed because they are foolish...
...Etc...
...It is just that the mirror has been changed...
...This is both the true and the useful point of application of individual effort...
...theirs was created, however, by the Horror of the Bomb and the Shame of Segregation, and confirmed by Everything...
...The curse of our national life has been the disjunction of idealism and practicality—and the consequent excessive tension and overblown stature of each: each is dominant in its own good time...
...When, as they age, some of them refuse to grow up, and their soured idealism turns them vicious, we can drench them in I-told-you-so's and other invective...
...I will be most interested to see how much of their idealism they take with them into the darker reaches of the administrations they will inhabit later in life...
...and these kids are, very irritatingly, the living proof of that fact...
...But I think they will be damaged more by their impossible idealism, than by their eventual rediscovery of the existence and effect of rational authoritarianism and irrational antiAmericanism on the left...
...The simple fact of the matter is that we ourselves made the tradition unavailable...
...We aged, and so did the doctrine...
...The fact that this may be very much to the disadvantage of the young activists, does not alter the character of our reasonable expectations...
...If some little smidgeon of the energy devoted to the pietistic tending of the Eternal Flame of Doctrinal Purity had, instead, gone into actual thought about the structure of American power (or even compulsive precinct work)—if we had helped Marx a little—then we might be in a position to complain...
...We invite further comments from readers, preferably of modest length.— EDITORS The surviving socialist generation had no sufficient reason to expect that the new fellows should or would follow their lead...
...But moralism, thus confirmed, oozes into neighboring brain-cells...
...So what should we do about it...
...A lesser tradition...
...Weep, brother, weep...
...As it is, however, while viewing with dismay we had better include ourselves in the landscape...
...They are just not interested in adapting our trauma to the framework of their current perceptions...
...The alta Marxists are correct, certainly: what a comedown from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France...
...In our time, we asked the same question they repeat endlessly today— Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the most radical of all...
...and this way, the opportunities for creative troublemaking persist for a lifetime...
...That discussion now continues with the following articles, as well as some letters in the Correspondence section...
...You betcha...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
