A Dim Outlook for Radicalism

...Probably the very best to be anticipated is a slowed drift to the Right...

...It is already severely flawed by compromise with the outside demons, if not actually "subservient" to the Pentagon, the knowledge industry, and other valued patrons of the multiuniversity...

...It is in the Democratic party...

...is largely a history of failure and therefore not a source of comfort to those who look to the past to find ancestors and heroes"—after the fashion, for example, of Staughton Lynd in the Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism...

...It is simply that their agenda is a good deal more relevant than the radicals' shopping list to the uninspiring jobs which lie between today's politics and any prospect of improvement in tomorrow's politics...

...I take this to be the fact, and from it I draw two not very novel inferences...

...The job ahead is the avoidance of deterioration, it is not the construction of a brave new America...

...The New Leftists are "no more serious about the university than they were serious about anything else...

...The New Left explains nothing, and for those who find its style of life repellent it is a reason not to be a radical...

...There is absolutely nothing to rejoice about in all this, but it is a fact of our contemporary political life and not the likelier to disappear for being ignored or deplored...

...During the next four or eight years, it is not going to be easy to maintain—even in their contemporary defective condition—civil liberties and civil rights...

...If the Old Left is interred and the New Left is a mess, what should a genuine radical do in the Nixon era of lowered voices...

...The first is a simple reinforcement of the weaknesses of radical theory...

...Indeed, this is a labor in which radicals should be willing to participate while they are perfecting their architects' sketches for the New Jerusalem...

...Lasch is quite convincing in his disposal of Galbraith and Harrington...

...He has no trouble in persuading me that the growth of American radicalism will be slow...

...Even in the long run, it is difficult to take seriously the emergence of an electoral majority composed of the elements Lasch relies upon...

...Lasch is a radical, and the agony of which he writes is his own...

...I do not wish to be misunderstood as alleging that liberals are in much happier political or intellectual shape than the radicals...

...If this is the best an intellectual radical of Lasch's intelligence and fervor can offer, the outlook for radicalism is as dim intellectually as it is politically...

...But precisely because radical theory is weak or absent, repression of civil liberties and civil rights a real possibility, and the outlook for a radical party dismal, one would think that the case for the Left liberals working within the Democratic party was exceptionally strong...

...example that life under Socialism would be preferable to life under corporate capitalism...

...It is simply that the tension between the university as the ally of corporate capitalism and the university as a guardian of liberal scholarship promotes student radicalism and apparently a quantity of radical thought on the part of active faculty minorities...

...The first two groups, even in states like Indiana, gave heavy support to Bobby Kennedy during his primary campaign...

...The third favored Eugene McCarthy...

...This is not at all because professors are better than other people...

...The spirit is not lifted at the thought of several years of holding actions designed simply to prevent worse than we are now enduring...

...Harrington's coalition includes tne white working class, the blacks, and the middle-class liberals...

...Group by group, the sources of disaffection are as different, the political and economic interests as contradictory, and the aspirations as discordant, as anyone acquainted with the range of education, classes, colors, and experiences of life in America encountered by blacks and whites, college graduates and high school dropouts, urban workers and rural poor, would have predicted...

...Agreeing with Harrington, Lasch argues that Galbraith is un-realistically sanguine in his expectation that the benign infiltration of intellectuals and scientists from the universities into the corporations and the government bureaus will transform these institutions...

...New Frontier and Great Society mainstream liberals who tied their hopes to racial integration and Federal social policy have lived to witness massive Northern resistance to school and residential integration, the rise of Black Power militancy, and the perversion of many social programs into outdoor relief for the middle classes...

...There is simply no sign that a new radical party "explicitly committed to radical change" would in the visible future amount to anything more than the tiny factional splinters making up most of the depressing history of American radicalism...

...But, as Lasch dismissively asserts, there is precious little evidence that any of the members of the coalition feel a Socialist commitment...

...Although the grievances of the first two groups are still economic and the complaints of the middle-class liberals emphasize quality of life considerations, Harrington hopes the three constituencies can be converted to a democratic coalition devoted to Socialist planning...

...Lasch has little patience with Left or radical liberals who prefer to work within existing political parties...

...If there were such a party, Lasch's argument might carry conviction...

...In the long run" (the italics are Lasch's), the target is a "new political majority...

...But it is worth expending some effort to achieve such an effect...

...Yearning like many another for powerful social theory, Lasch finds it in neither Old nor New Left...

...Nor are social forces identifiable that are "automatically evolving toward Socialism...

...Lasch darkly suspects that the ex-New Leftists will turn horribly bourgeois, acquiring wives, children, houses, mortgages, and consumer goods just as though they had never been alienated from our American society...

...Unlike some members of the New Left, Lasch has the good sense to realize that "a mass movement for radical change cannot take place in a setting of repression...

...But worse is worse...

...This leads me to a second observation...

...the tensions between working-class whites and the black community...

...This is apparently to be an alliance of the disaffected, of dropouts from the American Celebration who will devote themselves to the creation of a "broad consciousness of alternatives not embraced by the present system...

...retreating from black alliances, and reacting with some of the self-protective emotions of ordinary "un-classy" Jews, to borrow Milton Himmelfarb's word, are tragic facts...

...The university itself is no haven of pure spirits...

...But, avers Lasch, radical liberalism is "no substitute for a radical party...

...What such proposals possess in common is a skepticism about planned interventions in the structure of American society in pursuit of confident goals and agreed-upon valuations...

...As a final count, Lasch approvingly cites Kenneth KenRobert Lekachman, a regular contributor to these pages and Professor of Economics at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, is spending the current academic year at the Harvard University Law School...

...Let it be plain that his own rhetoric, which features "the search for more durable forms of organization," the development of an "alternative political system," and the generation of "analysis and plans for action," amounts to a series of inspirational cries, not to be confused with a usable radical ideology...

...The New Left, in Lasch's judgment, is prey to "weakness, confusion, and incompetence," as exemplified in the staging of such fiascoes as the Conference for New Politics...

...Lasch's route to his own unsatisfactory recipe passes through Galbraith and Harrington terrain...

...The essays hang together, overlap is minimal, and the tone is consistent...

...It is not that in 1969 liberals have much better theory than radicals...

...Their other faults include "nihilism," anti-intellectualism and a recklessness of consequences that leads to bloody confrontation and increases the power of repressive groups within and outside government...

...At least, Lasch concedes, Harrington's approach possesses the older radical virtue of the search for mass support beyond the intellectual community...

...iston's conclusion that "The New Left is almost entirely a movement of young men and women...

...Where Lasch becomes as implausible as Galbraith and Harrington is in his identification of the probable members of his radical party...

...These new radicals will "show both by teaching and...

...But in spite of the long-run specifications of his vision and general pessimism of his mood, Lasch in the end yields to an optimism about the ultimate outcome that falls little short of the Utopian...

...More particularly, what should an intellectual, rational, nonviolent radical of Lasch's stripe do to recruit a new party of radicals sympathetic to his own vision...

...even the signs that Jewish intellectuals, an indispensable element in every man's radical party, are taking alarm, scenting conspiracies in the air...

...It] has a high dropout rate, and most young radicals have left movement work before they reach the age of thirty...

...What is rather more likely is that the military-industrial alliance will do a better job of subversion upon the missionaries from the universities than the university types will perform upon the bureaucrats and the corporate executives...

...In 1969, "The immediate constituency for a radical movement . . . lies in the professions, in sections of suburbia, in the ghetto, and above all in the university, which more than any other institution has become a center of radicalism...

...The hostility in New York between Jewish teachers and black advocates of community control...

...Nixon was not elected to enlarge the Great Society, put the generals and admirals on gruel and water, or rectify existing inequalities in the distribution of income, wealth, and economic power...

...And it follows that the natural place for ex-McCarthyites, ex-Kennedyites, even ex-Humphreyites is not in pursuit of political will-o'-the-wisps...

...WRITERS & WRITING A Dim Outlook for Radicalism By Robert Lekachman The Agony of the American Left (Knopf, 212 pp., $4.95), far more eloquent and searching than Christopher Lasch's earlier and overpraised The New Radicalism in America, is an assembly of articles from the Nation, Katallagete, and the New York Review of Books...

...Liberals and radicals will do well if they prevent new Vietnams and a still more powerful alliance of the military and the defense contractors...

...And as Lasch might have added if he had written his critique of Harrington in 1969 after three New York school strikes, there is much unpleasant evidence that the putative allies of Harrington's coalition distrust each other rather more than they hate their natural antagonists...

...Lasch is generally included as part of the New Left, but he occasionally has to remind himself of the movement's virtues because he has far more to say of its failings...

...In America the Old Left is dead, and it should be mourned only by the sentimental, he tells us, for "The history of American radicalism...

...Nowhere on the horizon is there a viable radical conception of American society...

...He concedes that insofar as the Left liberals help preserve traditional civil liberties they accord radicals the opportunity to develop their strength...

...In their present disarray, liberals are in considerable danger of accepting an ideology of social engineering, a world of social indicators and cost-benefit analyses that tends to mask the fact that nothing has been settled about social priorities and the allocation of national resources between private and public uses, and military and humane purposes...

...The New Left's novelty, as Martin Duberman has pointed out, is not analytical, it is in the creation of a radically different life style, compounded of sexual freedom, drug experimentation, communal living, and contempt for the amenities of middle-class life...

...Predictably the liberal reflex has been loss of confidence, and a somewhat aimless casting-about for such makeweight alternatives to conventional social welfare as decentralization, Federal revenue sharing and guaranteed annual incomes...