The Young Radicals: A Symposium
Walzer, Michael
In the past year or two, there has been a great deal of talk about a new politics among the young: a new interest in radicalism and perhaps even in radical ideas. Often enough, however, it has...
...Their answers suggest that there is little intellectual agreement among the "new radicals" and above all that there is little shared sense of what the future ought to hold...
...If radicals have ever believed that they could replace these two with spontaneous feelings and continuous activity, they were never more wrong...
...On the other hand, our politics is almost purely negative: against segregation, HUAC, capital punishment, bomb testing, civil defense, intervention in Cuba, and so on—it would not be hard to extend the list...
...How far-reaching are the changes you think necessary in our society...
...we are zealous but by and large not committed...
...we are often anti-ideological...
...2) What are the political issues in which you are most interested...
...Our pessimism, negation and fearfulness are indeed spontaneous, but they are not enough...
...What is most engaging about the activities of the sixties, I think, is the keen sense of pleasure in our politics, the desire for personal encounter, the organizational naivete...
...In the past year the old question "what can we do...
...The sit-ins and the freedom rides, the occasionally riotous efforts to force the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the campaign against capital punishment, the peace strikes and marches—all these demonstrate only the temporary charm and limitations of the young...
...Do you feel that your political views are different from those of an earlier generation of radicals...
...Inevitably, that discussion must also be a dialogue between younger and older radicals—if only because the disagreements among the younger writers are not startlingly new...
...There was something more in the older radicalism—and I know that it survives: a positive and public ardor and an intellectual excitement, neither of which has been adequately replaced by our own activist enthusiasm or our keen personal sense of all the things we dislike...
...In the past year or two, there has been a great deal of talk about a new politics among the young: a new interest in radicalism and perhaps even in radical ideas...
...Some of the best of us withdraw, after a brief experience of frenetic activism, into a radicalism so private and egocentric as to be incommunicable...
...Brief biographical notes on the contributors can be found at the end of the symposium...
...In the aftermath of the Cuban intervention a marked pessimism seems to have descended upon many young people...
...THE QUESTIONS 1) In what ways do you identify yourself as a radical...
...To what extent would you withhold sympathy from movements which seem destined to, establish authoritarian regimes...
...We are most alert to those possibilities which we oppose and dread...
...We should indeed guard our politics from becoming merely a matter of stereotyped reactions to events which are not part of our own experience...
...Surely there is now an enormous need for thought and argument which will break through the limits we have up until now endured...
...The Cuban revolution, for example, has divided opinion along familiar lines, despite our intense desire to be original...
...I asked Lewis Coser to comment on the symposium responses not in order to conclude the discussion with an authoritative voice, but rather to begin it properly...
...We lack political perspectives...
...And I think that, for all our disagreements, something of my own desire to find again a way to a creative public life motivates most of the contributors to this symposium...
...4) In what ways do you think Americans should respond to the nationalist and revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped countries...
...Among ourselves, there has been all too little communication (we exhort each other instead), too little boldness in presenting and defending a coherent viewpoint, too little intellectual self-exposure, too little hard work...
...5) What is your appraisal of the Kennedy Administration...
...The false sophistication and largely vicarious weariness of the fifties is gone, while the surrender of self to history or party, which so often characterized the men of the thirties, has not reappeared...
...What forms of "commitment...
...And I can foresee a time when people will get bored with us...
...Do you have much to say to the socialists whose political education took place in the thirties?—much to learn from them...
...the new politics is activist but not very well articulated...
...For myself, however, I do not believe that we should turn to the older radicalism only for some insight into the nature of these disagreements...
...If we become strident and dull, it is because we have not yet found answers to an extraordinary question: how is it possible in America 1962 to grow up political...
...This is the reason, then, for the symposium which follows...
...has received some new answers...
...I asked a group of young radical intellectuals, some of them strangers, some of them associates in various political enterprises, to answer some questions about their personal commitment and ideological perspectives...
...But if all this is so, it is at least in part because we are disconnected from any firm sense of adult possibilities...
...Many young people have expressed a sense of estrangement from the older radical (and socialist) traditions...
...Do any of these seem to you to open the way to an effective left-wing politics in America today...
...Some of them have even suggested that they feel caught up in the futilities of the politics of an ancien regime...
...There are those among us who become adepts at holding poses—they are eternally young, the first to become boring...
...In a way, the cold war—the definitive political experience of my generation—has left us with narrowed political sympathies and narrowed minds...
...3) What forms of organization and activity do you feel are open to radicals today...
...Those of us who participate in it are most frequently the objects of interest, in a society which requires endless objects...
...What is your sense of the American future...
...What sort of personal response do figures like Lumumba, Castro, Sekou-Toure, etc., evoke from you...
...Often enough, however, it has not been young people who have done the talking...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
