Revolution Without the Masses

...The magnitude of the nation's ills demands immediate, fruitful efforts to eliminate socio-economic injustice...

...Though the cosmopolitans tend to ignore them, their critical importance to the country's future direction is revealed in a recent analysis of the 1969 Presidential election by the Survey Research Center (src) of the University of Michigan...

...In many instances, too, the political activists are the best students in our university system, and they will eventually occupy key positions in strategic sectors of our society...

...To read the nation's pulse on the basis of what one's friends and colleagues in cosmopolitan America think is intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous...

...The youth who works on the assembly line, in an office, or at a rural-related job is not as likely as the college graduate to broaden his intellectual and social horizons through educational, occupational or geographical mobility...

...So did the dignified, peaceful October 15 Moratorium, a credit to its college-age organizers...

...this means a majority do not, and it is a mistake to lump them together with their more affluent peers...

...Proportionately few people adopt an ideology or arrive at a political judgment by weighing the pros and cons in an objective fashion...

...ever since political scientists began gathering voting data, the gop, on balance, has been the party of the "college graduate...

...A romance with rhetoric and fashionable social analysis disRichard J. Krickus' articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post...

...George disembowels the smug, self-righteous liberal dragon with scathing bon mots that many of his less articulate viewers do not have at their command...

...Thus the young man from a suburban Republican community who eschews his parents' political orientation while in college may do so because of social pressures and not because he has uncovered new information inducing him to rearrange his earlier political perspective...

...The assertion was not only factually incorrect, it disregarded a primary concern of our urban citizens whose fear of street crime is well-founded...

...The political orientation of America's youth is not homogeneous...

...By renouncing "politics of persuasion," student radicals apparently helped politicize a heretofore apathetic, conservative-tending sector of our society...

...Dick Nixon, after all, is President of the United States, and as long as the Lefts confuses rhetoric with reality he is likely to occupy the White House until 1976...

...Political attitudes ate a function of social relationships...

...One problem is that we never had contact with these neighborhoods until last year...

...During the 1968 Presidential campaign...

...Families in this income bracket have many problems, but they are not rooted in affluence...

...Whatever the merit of the charge, it is irrelevant to millions of working-class Americans who are just barely making ends meet...

...Today Herbert Marcuse, in a vain attempt to salvage a lifetime commitment to a worldview rooted in the 19th century, is applauded by college radicals who proclaim that the American worker has been mesmerized by material goods...

...But the Weathermen and their ilk are a minority...

...The Children's Crusade frightened the old pols, but the sight of young intelligent activists working within the system struck a chord of hope in those of us who are committed to democratic change...

...A truer picture of what we can expect from today's college students was provided last year in Eugene McCarthy's campaign for the Presidency...

...For while these voters have rejected the New Left's programs, many have embraced participatory politics in the sense that they no longer limit their political behavior to the voting act alone...

...Persons who wished to end the Vietnam war by adopting a more hawkish posture in Southeast Asia, and those who found Wallace's view on racial matters congenial or who felt the "liberal parties" had ignored them, backed McCarthy as a protest...

...To this end, the white working class and the millions of Americans who have newly entered the middle-class from all age groups are an important political resource...

...The myopia of the cosmopolitan Left brings to mind William F. Buckley Jr., who is concerned about the welfare of "our boys" in Vietnam but does not bother to speak about their not having jobs, decent housing, adequate medical care, and better educational options upon leaving the service...

...Given the scale of racism, poverty and our environmental crisis, it is irresponsible to find solace in such long-term solutions to our problems...

...Since the "proletariat" do not know what is good for them, the educated elite are obliged to speak for them...

...Newly acquired knowledge in adulthood and the influence of one's peers may revise earlier political views, but a man's political orientation is not usually a product of intellectual commitment...

...Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to the United States...

...Upon returning home or relocating in a typical "middle American" community after graduation, he may very well revise his political attitudes once again to fit into the mold of mainstream American politics...

...The most ominous threat to meaningful change in the United States today is the Left's isolation from the people...

...Yet the cosmopolitans have ignored these people and, in turn, they are held suspect by them...

...Their decades-old allegiance to the Democratic party proved a stronger force than their new romance with the Alabama Populist...

...Here we find the non-college young people and the university graduates who feed the forces clinging to the status quo...

...Hence, generation political differences are less visible in blue-collar urban and rural communities than in cosmopolitan areas...

...And while Mark Rudd fancies blue work shirts and proclaims "all power to the people," tough Tony Imperiale's boys in Newark's little Italy know that Rudd and his friends despise the men whose choice of apparel is based upon more pragmatic considerations...

...The frustration that induces the black man to applaud the irrational utterances of Rap Brown is comparable to the behavior of the alienated white man who is estranged from cosmopolitan America and admires the likes of Buckley and Spiro Agnew...

...the snake-dancing Japanese student militants often join the executive ranks of their nation's giant conglomerates upon graduation and adopt the life style of Oriental Babbits...

...On the contrary, members of the older generation who liked him but who had traditionally cast their vote for Democrats could not quite bring themselves to vote for old George when they entered the polling booth...

...Student confrontations with Establishment authorities, often involving arrest, are vivid indicators of the scope and intensity of their commitment to change...

...As a larger proportion of our youth enter college, one can even make a strong mathematical case that inevitably this will have an overall liberalizing effect...

...Wallace's appeal to the young blue-collar worker, then, is one of many factors contradicting the rather simplistic notion that a rising proportion of young people in our body politic portends a more progressive political future for the nation...

...Indeed, it can be said that the Wallace campaign was a prototype of the "new politics": Without a national political organization to speak of and nourished merely by small donations, he made his presence felt in 1968...

...In large part, this is because political attitudes are molded through manifest or latent processes in childhood...

...Attorney General Clark soothed a frightened nation with the pronouncement that America was not experiencing a crime wave...

...George Wallace has demonstrated that the mill hand and gas station attendant still count for something in this country, and that liberals cannot afford to wait for an educated youth to lead them out of a political cul de sac...

...In this way the New Left demeans the labor union, still the only meaningful organization the worker possesses...

...Among other surprising findings, the src study found that 20 per cent of the voters who cast their ballots for McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary voted for Wallace in the general election...

...The Harvard economist said in this book that our passion for material things was symptomatic of a sick nation...

...Much of what the liberal prima donnas have to say about the ills of our society just does not make sense to these people...

...While New Left students roast the liberals for snubbing the "masses," they themselves have been positively caustic in their treatment of the common man...

...In 1958, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society was published...

...Of course, it is a truism among cosmopolitan spokesmen that there is a correlation between rising levels of education and Left-wing politics...

...Buckley does not attempt to convey the fiction that he is one of them, but he often says what the common man would like to say...

...Hie difficulty with this kind of futuristic thinking is that it often obfuscates the present...

...By all rational criteria, Buckley's atavistic economic views should relegate him to a back seat in the hearts of the blue-collar folk...

...The figure is not much higher today, and inflation has actually resulted in decreased purchasing power...

...Yet the National Review's editor is something of a folk hero in the working-class homes which tune in on his tv appearances...

...The heroes who are revered on our college campuses are often scorned by the blue-collar folk in this country...

...As long as the cosmopolitan Left is bent on waging a revolution without the "masses," President Nixon and his conservative cohorts will control the political future of the United States for a long time to come...

...Speaking about working class animosity toward Mayor Lindsay prior to the recent elections, Lindsay aide David Garth said: "We're trying to find out what is bothering them...

...Available evidence, for instance, suggests that the generation gap may not be as salient in lower-income neighborhoods as it is in middle-class communities...

...This brings us to another side of the youth picture that has received little attention...

...Right-wing propagandists have exploited the tactics of sds to discredit the larger student Left now visible on campuses across the United States...

...Now the older generation of Americans undoubtedly owes a debt of gratitude to the college activists...

...They predict, moreover that as today's college activists come of age in the 1970s, the reactionary cliques responsible for institutionalized racism, poverty and the warfare state will be superseded by a new coalition bent on eradicating these oppressive conditions from our society...

...The src researchers concluded their analysis with the observation that the New Left's "confrontational politics" estranged voters from that movement, noting a heightened level of political awareness among non-college youth inclined toward the Right...

...A small, elite group of activists can play a major role in attaining this objective, but given the realities of our national life, comprehensive, meaningful reforms will not occur unless a majority political coalition is formed to bring them about...

...They have persisted in making an indifferent people conscious of how obscene it is that the world's richest power can mobilize its wealth and human resources to place a man on the moon, but cannot provide millions of its citizens with an adequate diet, medical care, decent shelter, a meaningful education, and equal access to the nation's wealth...

...Nevertheless, the college radicals and liberals who live, work and love in our universities and urban centers—that is, the cosmopolitan oases where the arts, mass media, and liberal professions flourish— are isolated from "mainstream America...

...He speaks for the worker insofar as he tosses verbal bean balls at the affluent, well-educated cosmopolitans who judge the factory worker and mill hand from their high-rise foundation offices, tv studios, and tweedy campus retreats...

...It is estimated that roughly 40 per cent of those Americans who are of college age attend institutions of higher learning...

...The political orientation that he acquired in childhood, therefore, may undergo little change in adulthood...

...This is the source of the Left's optimism...

...For under the klieg lights the conservative St...

...All of the preceding, it should be stressed, is not to deny that the average college student today is politically more progressive than earlier generations of college graduates...

...The parochialism of the liberal elite, however, is not merely a phenomenon of decision-makers in Washington...

...patterns of behavior and social norms differ...

...torts their vision...

...Significantly, too, the Michigan researchers discovered that the Wallace movement in the North was largely a youth movement...

...Perspectives REVOLUTION WITHOUT THE MASSES BY RICHARD J. KRICKUS The growing political awareness of America's youth and the trend toward progressive views on the nation's campuses have led liberal spokesmen and radicals in the mass media, the professions and the academic world to conclude that the "old politics" of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley, and Hubert H. Humphrey are dead...

...Evidence to support this contention is bountiful...

...As late as 1967 the average weekly take-home pay of a production worker (the elite of our blue-collar work force) with three dependents was $90.89...

...the ex-governor was not merely the candidate of crotchety old bigots...

...Yet on the basis of the available evidence it is illusory...

...Clearly, anybody who still thinks the student Left is a movement charged by a small minority, or is a unique preserve of the larger urban institutions and prestigious colleges, is deluding himself...