Short Shots: Rise of the Right On the Campus?
M., L.
------ShortShots Rise of the Right On the Campus? A STRANGE QumT has fallen on the American campus. At least as of mid-December: it may all be different by the time this is read....
...Reports from various colleges indicate that the organizations of the student New Left are in a poor way, though the senti ments upon which they have been able to draw are probably still there...
...Perhaps it is neither in SDS, what remains of it, nor YAF, whatever may become of it, that the essential campus developments are occurring...
...Whether it is a brooding quiet in preparation for the kind of explosion we had last spring, or a new phase signalling an end, perhaps a beginning of the end, for campus activism, no one quite knows...
...Only one organized political tendency seems to be flourishing a little on the campus, and that is the Buckley-style conservative YAF...
...How much does that signify...
...Perhaps we are looking in the wrong direc tions...
...Perhaps there is some new, vague, not yet articulated sentiment which can allow the young of the early seventies to fulfill the hopes of the early sixties...
...In the earlier phases of the New Left there was, to be fair, a strong moral passion in behalf of such positives as racial equality and peace...
...For the appeals made by both tendencies have something in common: a con tempt for the welfare state and the "grubby" material benefits that ordinary people try to gain, a general disdain for the plebes who are seen, from both ends of the political spectrum, as requiring elite guidance...
...Anyone who watched election night TV shows must have been struck by the fact that the Buckley headquarters in New York was crowded with young people, far more so than any of the others...
...M...
...But is it clear that by now these are less sullied than is the right wingers' proclaimed devotion to individual liberty...
...ShortShots Rise of the Right On the Campus...
...A few hundred kids, Left, Right, or Center, don't make a movement...
...But people on various . campuses tell us that Y AF is flourishing a bit, as perhaps the most coherent political group, though it is not yet backed by any sort of mass sentiment...
...At least as of mid-December: it may all be different by the time this is read...
...A STRANGE QumT has fallen on the American campus...
...To move from a period of New Left to a period of New Right on the campus would be an unhappy development, though not entirely a strange one...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
