A Truly Authentic Voice
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
A Truly Authentic Voice A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 By Paul Berman Norton. 351pp. $24.00. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of histoiy,...
...Yet its worst scars, Berman concedes, have been largely self-inflicted...
...Berman's second essay considers the rise of "identity politics" among homosexuals, a group bedeviled by private feuds and public hatred, with enemies ranging from Pat Robertson, the cable-ready evangelist, to Fidel Castro, the New Left's favorite revolutionary...
...Port Huron, says Berman, "showed everything that was viable and attractive in the liberal-Socialist labor tradition...
...The larger part claims that Fukuyama may be right (or wrong) about the end of history, right (or wrong) about the consequences of liberal democracy, right (or wrong) about the progress of mankind...
...They did not consider Fidel Castro in Cuba a nobler being than Leonid I. Brezhnev in the USSR, and their view of the good society did not much resemble the Woodstock Nation...
...They wanted to leave behind the privileges and comforts of middle-class student life and go fight in the street and in the universities for a better world, just the way the heroes of the Resistance had gone into the street to fight against the Nazis...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of histoiy, Rutgers...
...Part of it reminds me of a Woody Allen takeoff on intellectual discourse...
...Each essay has a strong thesis...
...Yet the world beyond their homes and neighborhoods—the world of colonial wars in Algeria and exploited Third World workers in Marseilles—seemed frightening, ugly, in need of radical change...
...They were rooted in the angry (if obscure) battles "between young and old in the traditional Left-wing parties" of Western Europe and the United States, he believes...
...He belongs to a dying breed—the public intellectual?that roamed New York City in the dark days before p.c, think tanks and Stanley Fish...
...Aligned with the student protests of 1968 were a host of "radical" movements that challenged the way Americans thought about race, gender, sexual orientation, the environment, and the like...
...America's student movement in the '60s was led by a tiny vanguard of activists who excited millions of privileged young people, for short periods, with their moral fervor and confrontational style...
...Moderate, hardheaded leadership gave way to marathon meetings in which every crackpot had a voice...
...The movement for gay rights is viewed as one of the great human rights struggles of our generation...
...Fortunately, Berman gets beyond these positions in his third essay, an account of his journey to Czechoslovakia at the moment Communism came crashing down...
...Unlike the fashionable Left-wing intellectuals of Europe and the United States, the Czech people view American culture as a liberating force, not a vehicle of imperialist oppression...
...If no critic today can match Macdonald's precise prose and acid wit, Berman comes closest, I believe, to sharing the master's passion for rigorous cultural standards and independent political thought...
...Of course, the fall of Communism in 1989 was the trite revolution?liberal and democratic, not radical Leftist in the '68 style...
...barechested young men danced erotically on flatbed trucks...
...Berman also focuses on the student rebellions outside the United States, especially in France...
...What struck Berman about Czechoslovakia was the reverence for America and its ways...
...The '68 rebellions, he tells us, were a "a young people's rehearsal, preparatory to adult events that only came later...
...Things were better," writes Berman, "but only for oneself...
...The young people demanded action, solidarity with the oppressed...
...Using Francis Fukuyama as his foil, he traces the path of liberal democracy in modern times...
...Can it reach beyond the hipsterism and false Utopias that defined the '60s, when the movement first took flight...
...Berman concludes with some thoughts about "the end of history...
...row after row of...
...The dream of Port Huron dissolved into the lunacy of the Weather Underground...
...Berman is optimistic...
...They did not need the guidance or direction of their elders...
...Berman would have done better, I think, to consider some powerful Jewish traditions that transcend national borders: traditions of radicalism, protest and respect for minority rights...
...who seemed to be, still, soaring on a cloud of sexual exaltation, dancing seductively, almost as if beckoning to the crowd and crying out, 'Join us!'" Can the gay movement transcend the Age of Aquarius...
...On the back of a flatbed truck bearing the grim banner 'HIV-Positive' came yet another gaggle of handsome barechested young men...
...Berman might have held his own...
...Here, too, he employs the Feuer model, with an ethnic twist...
...As democrats," it began, "we are in basic opposition to the Communist system...
...The young people, says Berman, felt pride for what their parents had once accomplished, but contempt for what their parents had become...
...Though SDS could still recruit thousands of students for Vietnam War protests as late as 1969, its national leadership had gone "mad...
...A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy...
...each is sound enough to stand proudly on its own...
...and what distinguishes A Tale of Two Utopias, in the end, is its combination of political toughness and truly original ideas...
...the elders not...
...Yet, as Berman reminds us, the early SDS was a far cry from the criminal madness that would mark its later years...
...Some day soon, says Berman, Americans may discover a gay majority, square and middle class, "preparing to announce, in a polite and well-modulated tone: 'Pardon the intrusion, fellow citizens, but henceforth nobody's gonna f___with us, either.'" Did the radical Leftism of the student rebellions leave anything positive behind...
...This is not a "book" in the traditional sense, but rather three essays and a conclusion bound together by a few central ideas...
...Plain to the author, but fuzzy, even offensive, to others...
...This generational split made one point very clear: The young Leftists felt they could succeed on their own...
...Marxist experiments were good, they insisted, especially the "small c" communist movements of the emerging Third World...
...What the United States supplied the adult revolutionaries of 1989, according to Berman, was the blueprint for their second Utopia: "a liberal democratic political system, a functioning market, free trade unions, a commitment to open debate and rational ways of thinking...
...Others may find order in this essay...
...It was like the 1930s all over again, says Berman, with new Stalinists now in command...
...Yet this strength is also a weakness, for Berman seems reluctant to create a unified structure from these polished, independent parts...
...Some see the protests as a political awakening for oppressed people...
...The generation of 1968—Berman's and mine—has found an authentic voice...
...In place of the Holocaust and the Resistance, Berman substitutes "American experiences," such as parents suffering "in the labor wars" and being "persecuted during the McCarthy era," adding that "the parallel between the French and the Americans was plain enough...
...He believes the idea of sexual freedom is gaining strength on the world stage, and he envisions the gays, sobered by aids, becoming more conservative and image conscious, although no less demanding of their rights...
...The essay, not the book, is his weapon of choice...
...And the reason goes far beyond material concerns...
...affirmed the strangest of all strange slogans: 'Rectal Pride,' 'Vaginal Pride...
...Impatient, idealistic, they strongly identified with the changes then sweeping the globe...
...Using Feuer as a guide, Berman sees the '60s as a generational struggle, fueled by major "revolutions" against Western imperialism and middle-class culture...
...In the United States, for example, older Leftists had little sympathy for the Marxist "liberation" movements and campus protests that so deeply excited the young...
...The experience gave him a new perspective on old events...
...Berman well understands the huge obstacles facing gay rights advocates: Their demand for sexual freedom—the simple right to love and be loved—is, for millions of Americans, a disturbing idea...
...America means freedom...
...That chore is left to the reader...
...Though his work often appears in sleek magazines like the New Yorker, he would have been more comfortable, one suspects, trading punches with Dwight Macdonald in the pages of Politics, circa 1948...
...The conclusion jars, I suspect, because the writing that comes before it is so clear...
...The young people were eager for risk...
...To young eyes, Mao and Ho and Fidel were positive forces in history, representing a fundamental shift in power from the privileged elites to the struggling masses...
...Random persons...
...In the early 1960s, groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were created as independent entities to champion a more radical view of the world...
...Next...
...Fetishists decked out in leather motorcycle caps and studded risque leather pants came rolling along in still more trucks, followed by strangely flabby and obese sadomas-ochists who marched down the street literally flogging one another...
...Decisions were made by "consensus"—meaning that nothing got done...
...No longer the risk-taking adventurers of World War II, they appeared content with petty-bourgeois pleasures, insensitive to those below...
...Young leftists thought otherwise...
...This is a powerful piece, filled with observations that the average college professor, fearing the label of bigot or ho-mophobe from campus thought police, would rarely express out loud...
...They grew up," Berman explains, "during the greatest prolonged boom in the history of capitalism...
...He begins with a superb essay about the worldwide student rebellions of 1968...
...real, not imaginary...
...Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice" PAUL BERMAN, one of America's leading social critics, is a throwback to the era when "serious thinking" existed outside academic walls...
...I was confused...
...A Tale of Two Utopias shows Berman at his best: crisp, learned and perceptive...
...author...
...It is a vision, an ideal, for poor and persecuted people...
...The statement went on to criticize America's "unreasoning anti-Communism" in domestic and foreign affairs, and to list the issues?disarmament, poverty, civil rights—to be aggressively pursued...
...Their parents disapproved...
...But this problem is compounded, he points out, by fringe elements who drive the gay public agenda, not unlike the student protest leaders...
...Berman's theory is based on the work of Lewis S. Feuer, a frequent New Leader contributor, who traced the history of numerous student movements in his pathbreaking 1969 book, The Conflict of Generations...
...Women marched by in masses with their blouses stripped off...
...Normal people quit in droves...
...In France, for example, the most militant Left wing students were either the children of Holocaust survivors or of the Jewish Resistance heroes from World War II...
...others view them as a disaster for liberalism that persists to this day...
...Yet the leaders of 1989—Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Adam Mich-nik in Poland—had been the student leaders of 1968 in their countries, connecting one revolution—or Utopia—to the next...
...Everything that their parents had lacked, the children came to possess: comfort, peace, security, democracy, education, opportunity...
...Berman is both a craftsman and a thinker...
...Furthermore, his writing strategy, like Macdonald's, favors the quick knockout over the 15-round fight...
...Those who remained were fringe types—assorted Communists and "red diaper babies"—for whom Left-wing authoritarianism seemed to have some genetic appeal...
...The originality in Fukuyama's version of Yankee Hegelianism consists mostly in taking Kojeve's version of Hegelian metaphysics and trying to give it a scientific basis...
...This moderation did not last long...
...It is common knowledge, of course, that Jews comprised a large percentage of student leaders in both the United States and Western Europe...
...Ultra-radicalism versus Left-wing caution was the crucial division...
...While this model is provocative, and perhaps even sound, it makes far less sense when applied to the United States, where the majority of student leaders also were Jews...
...The problem, as Berman makes clear, was that SDS quickly became a prisoner of its own rhetoric about participatory democracy and the evil of elites...
...Indeed, its declaration of principles?the so-called Port Huron Statement?expressed solidarity for oppressed people under Soviet rule...
...Scholars of the '60s are divided...
...His description of a typical Gay Pride parade is compelling: "[First] the dour gay politicos [went] by demanding civil rights...
...In Cleveland, Berman notes, the local SDS chapter held a 24-hour session "to decide whether to take a day off and go to the beach...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
