Radicalism on the Cheap

...BOVE ALL, NO PROGRAM," was Disraeli's classic prescription for conservatism...

...To be blunt, few Radicals have any direct and immediate stake in the problems with which they express concern...

...intractable problems, not by an effort at the understanding which must precede the formulation of radical solutions, but only by seeking to discern the proper attitude to be adopted...

...It cannot even produce a lively intellectual environment...

...We have Radical educational integrationists who know not of the Coleman report, and Radical sympathizers with the developing countries who have not heard of the UNCTAD proposals of Dr...

...NOTEBOOK This is scarcely the attitude, however, of the Berkeley activist who recently complained that: "The trouble with trying to understand politics and society as they are taught in the university is that everything seems so complex, so subject to a multitude of seemingly unrelated or contradictory constructions and interpretations...

...ALL OF Tiffs is not to say that there are not any new ideas on the current scene...

...Radicalism is not just a series of expletives nor is it merely a mood of alienated intransigence...

...They seem not to have reflected on how simply abandoning the rank-in-class alternative, and consequent sole reliance on a paperandpencil test, would have affected the student bodies at colleges not so resolutely white and middle-class in composition...

...But such a position cannot be called radical in any honorable sense of the word...

...It is a luxury available only to those who have no direct stake in government policy...

...Their political discourse is marked by a certain vividness of style but a dearth of substance...

...Raul Prebisch...

...This smugness is a product of the middleclass nature of so much contemporary Radicalism...

...They react to complex events and * Gerald Rosenfeld, "Generational Revolt and the Free Speech Movement," in The New Radicals, edited by Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, Random House, 1966, p. 215...

...Their arsenal of political rhetoric consists, in fact, of the relentless even if somewhat imaginative reformulation of a handful of rather stale propositions...

...Published almost simultaneously with the report of President Johnson's Automation Commission it proved to be, Vietnam apart, much less radical than the latter document which bore the signatures, among others, of the President of the Polaroid Corporation and the Chairman of the Board of IBM...

...They are carefully exclusivist in their social life, which they tend to identify with political life because so much of it consists of political conversation...

...Unlike Social Security or Medicare, for example, few of the current domestic policies being urged from the Left will benefit directly members of the middle class...

...Radicalism requires, above all, intellectual dedication and perseverance...

...Some, such as open housing or integration of Northern public schools, may even affect them adversely...

...Marx...

...Conformity becomes the price of membership in the sect, and dissent is counted as heresy to be punished by social ostracism...

...We have long made the distinction between democrats and Democrats, republicans and Republicans...

...George Bernard Shaw once remarked of a Socialist candidate whose unwillingness to compromise cost him his seat in Parliament, "I do think that Joe might have put up with just a speck or two on those white robes of his for the sake of the millions of poor devils who cannot afford any character at all because they have no friend in parliament...

...Members of white, middle-class faculties at white, middle-class colleges and universities displayed great enthusiasm for the abandonment of rank-in-class as a basis for draft deferments...

...An unwillingness to compromise, which seems an index to the militancy and purity of Radical demands, may be born of the knowledge that failure carries with it no personal penalty...

...Necessity is the mother of compromise as well as of invention...

...Confident that their opinions are fashionable in the world in which they move, these Radicals forget Mill's observation that for each man the world consists of that with which he comes in contact...

...It is rather between those whose commitment drives them to the hard intellectual work of developing, or at least learning of, the new solutions that genuine radicalism requires and those for whom the badge Radical is merely a mark of being a la mode in the restricted circles in which they travel...

...Both the platform and the subsequent campaign proved their Radicalism to be a mere quantitative liberalism...

...A political style that seeks merely to dramatize alienation (particularly when that alienation is often quite voluntary) has no need of ideas...

...On balance, it seems fair to say that the platform, again excepting Vietnam, will prove to have been well to the Right of the 1968 national Democratic platform, and perhaps the Republican as well...

...As part of a posture of revolutionary defiance it is becoming enough, yet too often such Radicalism serves the status quo hardly less faithfully than the most intractable defense of the existing distribution of privilege...

...It was enough for them to make a gesture of defiance even though the direct result, had their recommendation simply been accepted, would have been the quite reactionary one of exclusive reliance on an examination culturally contaminated so as to discriminate against students not themselves comfortably white and middle-class...

...Thus, avowed Radicals assure one another that the election of Lester Maddox as governor of Georgia is "a good thing in the long run...

...Or as Swift said, "It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom...

...This is surely a curious state of affairs...

...Meanwhile, the very essence of radicalism has been demeaned...

...The explanation for this phenomenon seems to lie in the quite deliberate isolation of so many Radicals from other radicals and of potential allies of the radical movement...

...Their programmatic sterility is surely a bizarre chapter in our political history...

...Pangloss than from Dr...

...Another recent example of this same uninventive intransigence was shown in the attitude of some academics toward draft deferments of college undergraduates...

...A group of ghetto Negroes or Mexican migrant workers will also lack social diversification, but such groups are unlikely to exude a note of self-satisfaction...

...Vogue becomes a surer guide to public affairs than knowledge or thought...

...With each heretic excommunicated the sect is reinforced in its sense of communal virtue, but it also becomes smaller as a political force and more stultifying in its intellectual atmosphere...

...Their intellectual training gives them a marked verbal facility, but not originality of thought...

...The radical is one who seeks to grasp complexities and not impatient to dismiss them...

...I happened to witness a nearly pure example of this in the spring of 1966, when a group of college-based Radicals decided to enter a candidate for Congress in the Democratic primary election in the Sixteenth Congressional District of Pennsylvania...

...And this is the point...

...Assuming the name of Free Democrats (presumably to distinguish themselves from the plantation owners comprising the membership of the regular Democratic party), they entered the political fray...

...Johnson had labored to secure...

...Where once radicals were accused of providing answers to questions yet to be asked, we now observe professed radicals indifferent to both questions and answers...

...A STRONG ARGUMENT for the strategy of coalition politics is the impulse to creative intellectual activity generated by the necessity to find policies that will unite divergent groups by reconciling their conflicting interests...

...Nor were their objections to the use of rank-in-class accompanied by affirmative proposals that were calculated to remove admitted inequities in the draft system...

...This absence of immediacy produces a marked note of aggressive dilettantism in the activities of many Radicals...

...THE PLATFORM itself proved to be interesting precisely because it was such a bore...

...The Free Democrats were fashionably accoutered with a biology professor as candidate, a chemistry professor as party chairman, a mathematics professor as campaign manager, and (an exquisite touch) a poet as chairman of the platform committee...

...It is to say rather that many Radicals are unaware of their existence...

...Radicalism is thls converted to Radicalism of Social Approbation...

...Middle-class and upper-middle-class in origin, they are usually found in association NOTEBOOK (sometimes as non-students) with an institu tion of higher education...

...We seem now to confront daily a brand of radicalism which is innocent of serious social theory, ignorant of political tactics, and contemptuous of history...

...Impregnably Republican in composition, the Sixteenth District offered the ideal circumstances for a Radical political adventure because, to borrow a phrase from Bennett Berger, the outcome was certain to be the nobility of defeat rather than the responsibility of victory...

...The smugness derived not merely from the fact of social homogeneity but from the nature of that homogeneity...

...It is made the more so when we reflect that this ignorance is characteristic of many who are scarcely less insistent on their being Intellectuals than they are on being Radicals...

...The dictum that half a loaf is better than none has little appeal to the possessor of a full loaf...

...Their solution for domestic problems was simply to spend more money than President Johnson proposed to do on programs the enactment of which Mr...

...What has long been an honorable position has been converted into merely a defiant posture designed only to dramatize alienation from society...

...Indications that the Governor may have holstered his axe handle seem, ironically, to have disappointed Radical hopes for hastening a showdown—in Georgia...

...YET THESE RADICALS sincerely, and even somewhat ostentatiously, styled their effort as a radical one...

...The Free Democrats turned out to be Radicals whose disdain for conventional politics was unaccompanied by any acquaintance with radical alternatives...

...They expressed this appraisal to one another and it met with general agreement...

...Possessed of a political consciousness that is virgo intacta, they are innocent alike of the Freedom Budget and of the report of the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress...

...They possess a remarkable degree of social homogeneity...

...Such a Radical falls an easy victim to that sectarianism which is the product of exclusivism...

...The world of radical ideas was obviously foreign to them and their attitude toward it was clearly one of avoiding entangling alliances...

...That this analysis commands little support among Georgia's Negroes gives them no pause, nor does that fact shake their conviction that they are the true friends of the Georgia Negro...

...Conformist Radicalism, when embraced by a group lacking significant social differentiation, cannot produce a significant political movement...

...The distinction is not one of old versus young or cynic versus idealist...

...To be a radical in politics it is necessary to be more than simply ignorant of conventional politics...

...It would serve as well today for many among us who relentlessly assert their radicalism...

...Their Radical credentials were clearly established by making the poet the party spokesman...

...Their students could, of course, secure deferment by the alternative device of achieving the required minimum on the Selective Service College Qualification Test...

...This complaint was voiced as support for the value of direct action...

...Producing them is more difficult than being chic, but since when has being chic been a radical goal...

...The present need is for ideas...

...Perhaps the time has come to separate radicals from Radicals...

...On even such manifest problems as nuclear proliferation or the population explosion they were silent...

...They prefer being radicals on the cheap...

...THIS UNCONCERN for the immediate plight of society's victims is part, of course, of a strategy of spoiling for the apocalypse that seems to derive more from Dr...

...Amid such an atmosphere of smug self-satis NOTEBOOK faction a note of dissent would have been as disquieting as a fire bell in the night...

...It is this absence of necessity that helps explain that combination of uninventiveness and intransigence which characterizes so many Radicals...

...but the outlook itself, while indubitably activist, is not radical in any meaningful sense of the word...

...Such direct action can, of course, be teamed to the pursuit of radical objectives...

...In politics as in life necessity is a spur to innovation...

...Even the Vietnam plank, while it contained some Radical rhetoric ("Our government should stop lying to us about this war"), leaned heavily on an extensive quotation from a Mennonite magazine, not a customary fount of radical ideas, and reduced itself to a fuzzy embrace of the Enclave Theory coupled with an unrestricted offer of negotiation...