The Young Radicals: A Symposium

...More is needed than thought, but thought is needed too, and there is little of it even among intelligent Americans...

...Some of the President's stated goals are seductive, and at moments it is tempting to fall into his arms with dreams of ultimate union...

...Furthermore, activity connected with it can leave feelings of effectuality in its wake, reversing the trend toward political alienation...

...One cannot become involved in it without getting a sense of the interrelatedness of issues...

...Granted that the issue of Stalinism will never be dead as long as there is a Left, that it was "the good fight...

...Obsessed with the phenomenon of Stalinism, the betrayals of which became the pivotal experience of their lives, they can think only of military revenge, a dream which they suppress just sufficiently to bring themselves into line with, of all people, SAC generals and Luce magazines...

...But if the last two months have increased my respect for a few people in the White House and State Department, they have not made me feel that many people in either the Administration or Congress have the vision and courage to break out of the patterns of establishment thought which hold us, as in a vise, in the path of war...

...To the extent that Americans have achieved a good society, they have done so in a curiously inarticulate fashion, celebrating what is trivial and even negative, and missing what really makes this country more livable than any other on earth...

...He has begun to fight back, although, as usual, begging (via hints dropped by his staff) leaders of public opinion and placers of ads to prepare the way for him rather than taking the lead himself...

...The lesson of the 1904-1916 and 1930-1938 periods seems clear enough: genuine progressives and liberals achieved most when there was an active Left beyond them...

...What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs...

...I would expect deviations, just as our city bosses of a few decades ago were deviations, and I would judge each one on its merits...

...Others of the old Left are now reacting in the opposite direction to identify economic goals as a total mistake and political freedoms as the sole criteria for judging social change and political activity...

...I should add, however, that with those of them whose humanistic spirit and hopefulness still predominate, and who have the courage to keep expressing this—the war danger has brought some such men prominence once again—I feel great kinship, and I have learned much from them...

...This will not necessarily be a majority but it may in many places be a decisive minority in the balance of the two-party system...

...They hold to a one-dimensional, non-dynamic view of The Enemy, judging all change in terms of a model fixed in the late thirties...

...Some of them are still arguing for state ownership of all large economic functions, without asking whether gains in convenience of allocation and the aesthetic pleasure of extirpating profit considerations really compensate for the creation of a new and impermeable bureaucracy...

...3.) My answer to question three is primarily a statement of faith in the life of ideas...

...The inside-dopester game need not be abandoned, but it would be foolish to ignore the need to establish an independent Left position and strength, something that will weather the next "inexplicable" victory of the military-industrial-right viewpoint in the White House without being shattered and disillusioned, and that may find more significant means of altering policy...

...What is disturbing about all this is that a President with any genuine socialdemocratic views would not be so subject to the parallelogram of forces in the first place...

...Of course we move on many fronts at once, and need not give up our efforts to supplant or sophisticate the liberal world view even while being grateful to liberals...

...If in spite of my efforts it came to a question of whether I should favor a greedy selfserving local boss who was colored over a greedy self-serving white official of Union Miniere, I would unquestionably choose the former...

...I will not venture to say what activity or route will prove to be the crucial one, nor even to say whether the prime hope is to shore up genuine liberalism or to supplant it...

...The point which must be grasped is that few if any nationalist-revolutionary leaders come to power with the dream of totalitarianism...

...In a situation as fluid as this, I prefer improvisation to programming...

...The war issue is, of course, the key to these sectors, but the war issue is educative...

...With a few exceptions, their recent function has been not to revive but to deny hope...

...We might reflect on what every young girl should know: that not all seductions lead to marriage, and some are for nothing more than momentary convenience...

...At the moment, then, just two considerations stand out: the new Left is still utterly inept politically, its only effectiveness being to play the games of influence and of demonstration...

...The question is whether we shall contribute to those dilemmas and that hostility or shall nurture such revolutions and help their leaders achieve their first vision before degeneration takes place and closes off the routes toward liberal freedoms and democratic socialism...

...I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a cracking shell of rationalization and denial, even when there really is a firmer ground to stand on...

...But almost as clearly a waste would be to speak only inward to the Left, rather than outward to the liberal and uncommitted...

...We have seen what hope parliamentary democracy alone is in the Congo, where positions change and contractual agreements are broken from hour to hour...

...One expects regimes which identify themselves with a national vision to try to maintain themselves...

...I am critical of liberals, but there is no one else near power who can avert war in the next few years, so I should like to make more secure the position of such as Fulbright...

...Keeping in mind what else I should like to see begun, the best way to aid liberals seems to be the development of an audible and numerically significant Left which could place them closer to the revered center...

...If the President has lost his chance to lead Congress by trying to please everybody during his first year, he is at least now very much afraid of war and resentful of rightist attacks and pressures...

...The old formula has not been clearly proven wrong, but it does not seem subtle enough to affect positively the course of development...

...The questions that must be asked of this reactive stance are endless and I shall not enter into them...

...5.) The Kennedy Administration is good, better than we could have dared to hope from Kennedy himself or from the Democratic party, except perhaps during the Party's brief, opportunistic flirt with enlightened liberalism in its 1960 platform...

...or in the fourfold definition of freedom in Erich Fromm's May Man Prevail...

...It is naive to suppose that parliamentary democracy is the be-all and end-all, sufficient as a goal unto itself in a land lacking the traditions of contract and legality (and also lacking unwritten techniques like the rotten borough system and the party machine which have propped up British and American democracy where it otherwise would have broken down...

...As an actor in the present I try to cut through the fraud and locate the authentically life-giving dimensions of this society...

...The crisis of the old order was only superficially encountered in 1929-32...

...it occurs in a far deeper sense in the early sixties, as spokesmen for militant free enterprise ideology veer toward a war whose finality and pointlessness are obvious to a growing minority of Americans...

...As a student of history I look for the sources of the hopeful developments, trying to figure out what became of them and why practically no one undertook to give them a place in the American self-image...

...And I would expect to get bitten (expropriated, denounced, temporarily snubbed) now and then...

...This, and the skew toward youth in the voting population since the warbaby generation has begun to reach voting age, have great political potential...

...2.) I am most concerned about foreign affairs: disengagement, disarmament, world government, world birth control...

...1.) I have little to say to or learn from most socialists and fellowtravelers of the thirties...

...In this I feel myself to be racing not only against hot war but against the Cold War as well, for the latter drives the country to a retrenchment which will close off all experimentation in humane liberalism...

...Yet, these are procedural matters rather than substantive political goals...

...That is, progress on them is necessary to enable the latter to be pursued...

...Not even Lenin did, and only in his last years did he see the perhaps irredeemable toll of corruption which the course of revolution and the problems of power had taken among the Bolsheviks...

...This is not a situation for optimism, but a hopeful resolution to work leftward on several fronts and with several tactics seems far from unrealistic...

...To begin with, I would still press for democracy, but on all fronts, not just the political, so that the organism could grow whole...

...and both of these will support something more courageously visionary, peace-oriented, and anti-crank-militant than the present Administration and Democratic party seem capable of bringing forth...

...In all cases, however, I would try to, keep riding the leftist tiger in hopes of heading him off rather than abandoning him and trying to starve him out...

...Since much of the old Left and pacifist movement has what Robert P. Wolff calls the loser psychology anyway, they are a bottomless sink ready to receive and exhaust one's energies in endless theological disputation...

...4.) I would support such a leader as Lumumba wholeheartedly unless I could learn that he was nothing but a self-seeking totalitarian...

...The purpose of both activities—the purpose of any new radicalism with which I can identify—is to revive hope...

...Such are the Committee of Correspondence and several groups within professional organizations like the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the Federation of American Scientists...

...If the Left can then articulate its goals, find its spokesmen, and gain its political sophistication, it may find it self with an opportunity unparalleled in our history...

...and yet at some moment in the near future it will find that the Right has driven moderates toward it, along with a good segment of the young...

...Both in their enthusiasm for military solutions, and in their arrogant conviction that they have seen into the dark heart of the radical and know as no one else can what is really valid and what is self-seeking among political goals, they seem just too involved in settling their own accounts for a new Left to bother about...

...My political goals themselves are very long range and concern the alteration of social character and social structure in order to make possible for all people freedom in its broadest sense (i.e., both "negative" and "positive," in Isaiah Berlin's distinction...

...So much the more will it be true for the less ideological leaders of the new nations that authoritarian politics arises not from intent but from the dilemma of power in a hostile (non-nurturing) environment...

...They urge the "acceptable" formulas of deterrence, intransigence, and quiet strangulation...

...There is a tendency among some members of the anti-war Left (indeed, those with whom I am most intimately associated) to play solely the internal pressure group, working through friends in Washington and spurred on by their tantalizing hints and requests to counteract the rightists...

...Such things have begun to achieve nationwide scope and establish networks of communication reaching into sectors of the intelligentsia not previously tapped by SANE or the pacifist organizations...

...whether from power-lust or to safeguard the revolution is unimportant, for the actions will be the same...

...I see nothing new being added to the American world-view, and in particular no understanding of or sympathy for social change...

...America is like the inarticulate, mumbling hero of its modern drama, tragically unable to discover its own saving qualities in time to avoid a meaningless and wasteful end...

...Finally, some of the old Left seem to have become cold warriors...

...The city boss, after all, helped ease the unprepared immigrant into complex urban industrial civilization when nobody else gave a hoot for him...

...This, of course, is not to say that the Administration is good enough, but it is not as bad as it appeared to be at the time of Cuba...

...If the few liberals in Washington can save us from holocaust by promising to save the country from the radicals, I shall be delighted to serve, even if it comes to dressing up like a woolly anarchist for a while...

...By aligning for their psychic tranquility with the "hards" at home they help strengthen the "hards" abroad, fulfilling all their darkest visions and discrediting liberal hopes...

...They call any alteration or softening or liberalization, any hopeful but tenuous Soviet attempt to move away from rigid patterns and change the internal balance of "hards" and "softs," "merely a change of line...

...There are also tentative "movements" which will develop some political sophistication for those participating, even if, as movements, they last only a few months...

...While there is no clear route to political significance at the moment, there are a number of organizations raising the intellectual temperature...

...The only clear waste, then, is to remain silent...

...There seems to be little force behind the domestic liberal program, but even if this must be chalked up to politics, it is also true that the program for improving the quality of life is a shallow one, understandably the first to be abandoned since it rests on no deep concern for the alienation, impotence, and pent-up aggression of citizens of mass-industrial society...

...That is one reason why I have begun to march in demonstrations...

...Nor do I see evidence of any greater understanding of the potentiality for leadership in our democracy in a time of crisis —to expand the public understanding...

...it is nonetheless so far from primary at this time as to be virtually an irrelevant trap for men of good will...

...It became clear in January, for example, that Castro is still the national obsession and that the Administration was prepared to make cynical use of the Alliance for Progress program in order to buy votes in the OAS to support its vendetta...

...A secondary purpose is to make genuine liberalism possible in American politics...