Appreciating Radical Liberalism

...TODD GITLIN'S most recent book is Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives...

...The reader doesn't know whether to laugh or cry when reminded that, in 1966, with the student movement accelerating and Martin Luther King, Jr., leading the civil rights movement into Chicago, the editors of Studies on the Left, the most influential of New Left magazines, were denouncing reform, worrying that the gross danger facing the New Left was co-optation, and declaring that "liberalism will remain the dominant political ideology of the large corporations...

...In a time when the left seems to matter less than at any other time than in the last, say, half-century (except for the Greens who helped accomplish the ascendancy of George W. Bush and his cronies, if you call that mattering), he boldly proposes that what was sensible in a decade ripe for the left might remain important in a vastly less promising time...

...If a single word characterizes such politics, the word is (reader, are you sitting down...

...it is another to know when you've arrived there, and to be persuasive...

...In a dark time, he lights an affirming flame...

...But eventually it becomes clear that he is singling out one tendency for particular sympathy—and it is in its treatment of this tendency that Mattson distinguishes himself...

...Appreciative yet without illusions, Mattson goes beyond criticism or empty yearning...

...Indeed, to be muscular, deliberation required strong government...

...He insists that the New Left harbored a self-subversive streak, a subterranean intellectual tendency that deserves resurrection and cultivation...

...Mills, Goodman, and Williams are obvious choices, and not for bad reasons...

...On the way, it meanders, because Mattson, perhaps too loyal to a well-worn formula in intellectual history, sets up his quest as a sequence of profiles...

...Not a bad agenda for next week, month, or year...

...DISSENT I Fall 2002 n 101...

...What interests him about the sixties is not its chain of glorious (or ignominious) protests but its ideas, especially the thinking of those intellectuals who were not necessarily its most sweeping philosophical minds or most theatrical masters of ceremonies but who contributed sensible, "undervalued" ideas...

...Mills died in 1962, just as the student movement was roaring into a blaze...

...In 1965, he helped launch the teach-in moveBOOKS ment...

...As Mattson puts it, by 1965 Kaufman was convinced that "confrontational protests often did more to make protesters feel good about themselves than to change things for the better...

...Still and all, Mattson deserves much credit for unearthing and exploring an eclipsed strand of New Left thinking—and declaring that today, too, there is a "need for a chastened sort of radical liberalism...

...As a man of the left, he wants to search through a welter of events and writings for what might be usable in the present much different circumstances...

...Pennsylvania State University, 2002 314 pp $24.50 KEVIN MATTSON, a young historian whose shoulders are happily light of chips, has an audacious idea about the sixties and how to make use of them...

...Like Williams at his populist best, Kaufman enjoined dialogue with ordinary Americans, but unlike Williams, he did not think that smaller was more beautiful...

...But he also wishes to extract from their thought as a whole a particular kernel: thought about the place of political intellectuals...

...All in all, radical liberals needed to combine coalition politics, participatory institutions, and stronger government ("the completion of the welfare state" was a phrase of the time, one that few today would dare utter...

...From among the great swarm of ideas that circulated in the churning, blistering chaos of the sixties, DISSENT / Fall 2002 • 99 BOOKS Mattson has a particularly appreciative eye for one much-deplored tradition...

...As his students too quickly forgot, Kaufman did not think participatory democracy was a substitute for parliamentary democracy...

...It was necessary, Kaufman thought, "to show how proposals could be transformed into politics—that is, into effective change...

...Having begun his political life in the arid eighties, he writes from inside what he calls the left's "political void," yet without undue nostalgia or lamentation...

...Kaufman, perhaps best known for having taught Tom Hayden about participatory democracy, professed political philosophy for most of his career at the University of Michigan and wrote only one book, The Radical Liberal, which started as an article in Dissent (Irving Howe having generously invited him to write more sympathetically about the late New Left than Howe himself was inclined to do...

...To paraphrase something Mills once said about Cuba, Kaufman worried about the movement but he also worried with it, within it...

...They wrote prolifically, they were staunch and often visionary, they had followings and influence...

...After a look at Dwight Macdonald and his World War II politics conclave—whose members reveled in their disdain for the practical— he moves to the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the anarchist polymath Paul Goodman, the historian William Appleman Williams, and the political theorist Arnold Kaufman, concluding with a tour through the circles that edited the two main journals of the student movement itself, New University Thought and Studies on the Left...

...They sneered at the growing backlash, paying little attention to the gathering strength of the thennew conservatives, and forgetting that most of America was not champing at the bit to get on with the revolution...

...Affirming conscience and demanding results, it fights, too, with the backward-glancing, republican romanticism that flickers in the often luminous work of Mills and Goodman...

...In the sixties, the modifier he prefers is "radical," but the rock-bottom hero whom Mattson wishes to resurrect is that much-excoriated reform-minded defender of egalitarian justice, battered from the right as a crypto-communist and during the sixties frequently battered from the left by those who considered "corporate liberalism" the ideology of the ruling class and didn't have much respect for any other kind of liberalism either...

...That is, he is properly skeptical of the cartoonish notion that the sixties were all of a piece, whether you take them as noble or degraded, the start of a civilization or the end of one, a brilliant failure, a monumental idiocy, or a glamorous tragedy...

...Next spring Basic Books will publish his Letters to a Young Activist...

...For the next six years, he worked feverishly to move the Democrats to the left, in the same manner also used by Michael Harrington...

...As early as 1955, Kaufman was arguing that political theorists had a particular responsibility to attend to the consequences of action...

...New Leftists, he insisted, were gravely mistaken if they forgot that they "rely for support on the 'finks' they abuse...

...To name it, Mattson borrows a phrase from the political philosopher Arnold Kaufman: he calls it "radical liberalism...

...These ideas were undervalued even by sixties activists themselves, who, evading their own national history, sometimes preferred to wander exotic thirdworldist trails in search of some image of themselves turned inside out to resemble premodern Others...

...Here as elsewhere, Mattson's discussion is subtle and generous, if, in the end, deservedly scathing...

...Other historians, including this writer, have deplored the later New Left's self-destructive lust to undermine the liberalism that was the ground upon which it stood...

...Mattson is properly scornful of sixties mythologies pro and con...

...Williams, the defender of local, small-r republican activity, of which the teach-in is the exemplary form...

...100 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 Intellectuals in Action takes a while to get to the practical tidings it hopes to deliver...

...Scads of radical intellectuals were intoxicated by confrontation and inattentive to the consequences...

...He died in a plane crash in 1971, aged fortyfour— a year younger than Mills had been at his own premature death, in turn a year younger than Albert Camus at his own...

...As impressively big as it had grown, might it not grow still bigger and get more done by kicking out the jams, breaking with more cautious allies, pushing harder in the direction of militancy...

...0 NE OF THE unexpected tragedies of the student movement was that it mushroomed so fast as to swell up with inflated notions of how big and potent it was, and was destined to be...

...It is a particular set of ideas that interests him—ideas about the kind of politics that the left needs, and what intellectuals can do to promote such politics...

...A politics of truth" had to be married to "a politics of impact...

...Histories and evocations of sixties ideas and sentiments go in and out of fashion but they are not what Mattson has in mind...

...Why bother...

...Because the sixties, in some ways a more hopeful and in others a more desperate time than the present, were rich enough in left-wing energies, fluid enough, hopeful enough, and inspiring enough to drive many talented people to think hard about what an imposing left would be, about how to do good work as political intellectuals, and how to leave something valuable behind when the tide receded...

...He was an electrifying pole for the movement, but he didn't live long enough to contend with its strategic quandaries...

...The New Left was cursed by early losses...

...Mattson cannot solve it, either, and implies that the solution is easier than, in actuality, it is...

...Goodman, the decentralist agitator-therapist-novelist-poet...

...He presupposes that personal liberation, however delightful, is not good enough for the public weal...

...As a political strategist, Kaufman was, in a sense, a more practical Mills—Mills chastened, Mills with a movement to look out for...

...He wishes to honor the grandfathers— an honorable project...

...Putting it roughly, Mills is the pamphleteer...

...Nor does cultural radicalism interest him, except as an impediment to the difficult work of politics...

...Radical liberalism fights with the more expressive, grander spirit of going it alone, a line whose contemporary incarnation is Green-Nader recklessness...

...While Paul Goodman, among others, retained a passion for quick, hot-blooded action, Kaufman thought Rousseauan communion had to be complemented by Madisonian representation...

...liberal...

...It is one thing to call for a synthesis, or a balance...

...Mattson goes further...

...He is also a splitter, not a Jumper...

...To the consequences of thinking, too: he opposed the New Left romance with the Viet Cong on principle as well as on the ground of political calculation...

...When, exactly, civil disobedience would prove constructive and when not was a question Kaufman was wrestling with in his last years...

...In an endless chain of articles and memos, Kaufman strove to "keep the New Left in contact with America's political realities while it tried to push the country to the left . . . .forging an effective coalition politics, respecting the value of participatory democracy, accepting the limits of what radical liberals could accomplish while not becoming cynical, being tough-minded while not becoming interested in winning at all costs, arguing against American policies while not sounding anti-American, and facing one's enemies with respect and seriousness...

...Mattson is respectful of these elders—perhaps too heartily so—and, in these chapters, not terribly original...

...In 1962, he attended SDS's founding convention at Port Huron...

...There was more life in liberalism than the New Left understood, Mattson maintains, and that life was not exhausted...

...Close to the Students for a Democratic Society circle in Ann Arbor, Kaufman was devoted to civil rights and antiwar struggles...

...As history would prove two years later—" Mattson adds mildly, "with Richard Nixon's political victory, based upon a call for the 'silent majority' to rise up against dirty hippies, student activists, and liberal elites...—this assumption was false...