New Left vs. New Right:The False Choice

...To acknowledge that, however, does not require that the rest of us assume the posture of guerrilla warriors or turn our backs on the political arena...

...The Attorney General, in his oppressive "anti-crime" crusade and in other areas, is playing with his own form of dynamite...

...The issue that the Chicago Seven, and their attorneys and their apologists, refuse to confront is why—in the face of an ill-conceived case, a mindlessly biased, inept judge, and a vindictive prosecutor—they have enlisted so little general public sympathy...

...But more of that later...

...but essentially the same epithets were employed by those who have unsuccessfully endeavored to exile Marcuse from academia...

...But many observers are inclined to agree with the wry remark of one Democratic detractor that "Nixon's popularity is a mile wide and an inch deep...

...For example, a communications center that relays messages to Vietnam, or helps the war industry in any way, if that building can be knocked out of commission for a few hours or days, that's equivalent to the act of a liberation fighter who does the same thing in his own country...

...only recently he was denouncing the University of California for scheduling an appearance by Fred Schwarz, leader of the "Christian Anti-Communism Crusade," as a participant in a course on "Conservative and Traditional Views of Contemporary Issues...

...At the same time there is a pervasive sense that a right-wing mood is the dominant political fact of life...

...It was on an evening shortly before the publication of that manifesto that, along with Richard Rovere of The New Yorker and Norman Dorsen, a counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, I appeared with Rubin, Hoffman, and Davis on Channel 13, New York's "educational" television station...

...But apart from the malaise afflicting the so-called opposition party, the question arises as to why an Administration so distinguished by lack of distinction has managed to sustain a facade of political invincibility...

...In the face of many intimations that "Vietnamization" is a mask for maintenance of an interminable American presence in Vietnam, it took an excessive interval for their Policy Council to formulate any open resistance...

...This helped to explain, I contended, why in a time when there was so much justifiable reason for dissent, the dissenters were so indiscriminately disdained by so large a sector of Vice President Spiro Agnew's "silent majority...

...Sadly enough, only a day earlier, in a speech at Columbia discussing the burning of a bank at Isla Vista, in Santa Barbara, California, Davis had hailed the 1970s as the decade of bank-burning, as the 1960s had been the era of sit-ins...

...He was not merely a man with a credo of nonviolence...

...let us not quibble...

...The testimony that former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and his aides offered at the Chicago trial —with the jury indefensibly and outrageously excluded—was final corroboration of the Walker findings...

...There is a kind of muted panic in the air, as if no one is quite sure where the next explosion will occur, and few derive reassurance from stern Presidential proclamations...

...The answer seemed to be that they could not care less...

...Thus was presented the spectacle of a prosecutor admitting that a major aspect of his case had been a fraud...

...Hoffman is a theatrical Yippie who seems capable of turning on love and hate with the adroitness of a character-actor...

...Exploration clearly indicated that they had been engaged in the amateur manufacture of bombs and something had gone wrong with the experiment...

...This inexcusably vulgar outburst—recited while appeals were pending—was accompanied by the remarkable statement that, in the crucial confrontation outside Chicago's Hilton Hotel in August 1968, "for eighteen minutes the police moved in and got even for what they had been taking from the demonstrators for three days...

...New Right: The False Choice by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tt seems a long time ago since we heard a newly elected President of the United States named Richard M. Nixon proclaim a gospel of togetherness and implore a lowering of voices...

...but the original sin was Daley's...

...There is a more acute absence of anything that might be faintly called "moral leadership" than at any time since the Coolidge-Harding era...

...Although the point was never fully spelled out, I assume they intended to suggest that they were inhabitants of a world they never made, and that older citizens, especially liberals, had the burden of guilt for anything that happened in it...

...Davis is a serious, appealing youth who worked closely with Michael Harrington in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (as an outgrowth of the Student League for Democracy) and whose "radicalization" was finally completed under the guns of August 1968, in Mayor Daley's Chicago "police riot...

...Nixon continues to discover congenial arithmetic (as Lyndon B. Johnson did for so long...

...Obviously a far truer presentation of the alternatives would have included pairings with such men as Ramsey Clark, John Lindsay, Joseph Rauh, Allard Lowenstein, and others who have tried to hold up the banner of the Bill of Rights in this difficult time...

...A major clue to the answer can be found, I believe, in its skillful exploitation of the behavior of a small number of exhibitionist revolutionaries (the term "New Left" has become almost meaningless because the movement itself is so fragmented) who have constructed their own fantasy-view of America...

...There should never have been a "conspiracy" trial...

...some kids who were acting out the "revolutionary" fantasies of others had destroyed themselves in the process...

...The spiritual condition of the prosecution was inadvertently unveiled a few days after the verdict when U.S...

...most of the country never understood the nature of the travesty—or the trial...

...After I had asked Hoffman what had happened to the spirit of love that was supposed to inspire the Yippies, Davis commented earnestly: "Each time we preach love we get a punch in the nose...

...From the disruption of meetings and the seizure of buildings, they have advanced—or regressed—to the manufacture and use of bombs as a weapon of continuing terror...

...We gave the court system a heart attack, which is even better...

...the sober, documented report of the Walker Commission established what many of us saw on the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention...

...The Democrats are divided and defensive...

...But for the defense to have conducted it in those terms would have been to concede that there remains any validity in the democratic method...

...At times their argument appeared to be that Fascism had already descended on the land, and only bombs and other extra-legal methods could offer a meaningful response...

...Far from eliciting any expression of remorse, my words produced a series of tirades, the only discernible substance of which was that I, and others like me, were responsible for the disaster...

...But such men will not be brought down by a "revolution" that has neither aims nor coherence, that invites a contest of rival violences, that boasts of its great successes in stirring the allegiance of nine-year-olds, and that renders more difficult the effective emergence on a national scale of such spokesmen of a genuine "New Politics" as Ramsey Clark and John Lindsay...

...Who seriously believes that The System is shaken by such exploits—exploits which in fact merely re-enforce the Mitchell mania for "preventive detention" and other repressive primitivism...

...Ours is an attempt to attack capitalism, racism, exploitation—directly and militarily...

...Nixon's coup of last November 3, when he effectively sedated much of the nation— in part because so few dared to contest his spurious formula for a gradual peace...

...Agnew has succeeded in persuading much of the media to stage "debate" in a context most favorable to his own distorted image of America—and Rubin and Hoffman are valuable foils for that act...

...After that the police felt great...

...the blacks see Mr...

...And it said again what none of us can fail to recognize—that the methods of Mitchell will drive some of our most thoughtful and sensitive young men into the corner of despair and frenzy Davis now occupies...

...Rubin is a caricature of a fire-eating (for the purposes of this program, the fire was marijuana) street-fighter who perhaps inadvertently revealed himself when he proclaimed that thousands of children yearned for a chance to be "heroes"—presumably like his own self-portrait...

...These are not attacks on individuals who work in these offices or happen to be there...

...Perhaps more than any other modern American, Martin Luther King Jr...

...In our television exchange, Hoffman and Rubin expressed a preference for the term "guerrilla warfare...

...Unhappily, Professor Marcuse seems to persist in promoting the idiocy that he has a special right to determine whose voice shall be heard...

...It is hard to escape the conclusion that Mr...

...On economic issues, where the symptoms of combined inflation-recession have been so manifold, few have been willing to echo John Kenneth Galbraith's call for imposition of at least selective price and wage controls...

...This way, I submit, lies political madness—for the so-called revolutionary Left as well as for the country...

...It is the use that the buildings are put to that we are attacking...

...These reflections are, in fact, partially inspired by a television encounter I had with three of them—Jerry Rubin, Ab-bie Hoffman, and Rennie Davis, all defendants in the Chicago "conspiracy" trial—some weeks ago and some of the response to that bizarre episode...

...Unfortunately much of the argumentation since the trial ended has served only to augment the confusion...

...It should be said that Hoffman reminded me (as the Life bomber wrote) that the bomb-planters had generally taken pains to give advance warnings and thereby reduce the danger of mass casualties...

...If I seem to be burlesquing their lines, let the transcript be read...

...that they saw no vital distinction between Agnew and those who professed to be liberals (indeed, Rubin explained in one of his numerous recitals that I was a more sinister species than Agnew because they at least knew "where Agnew stands...

...But Foran's confession, which should have shaken the country, was swiftly lost amid such ravings as Rubin's post-trial description of the defendants' intent to induce physical collapse on the bench...

...one cartoon depicts the President as lamenting), Attorney General John Mitchell's repressive spirit appears to command the President's continuing esteem...

...And when I called attention to that oration, he neither disowned nor disclaimed it...

...We're not trying to frighten the Establishment, we are trying to destroy it, so that a just society can be built based on human values, not on financial or commercial values...

...I suggested with some mildness that the consequences of certain easy radical rhetoric were perhaps poignantly dramatized by these deaths...

...In the opinion polls Mr...

...that the most serious violence of that nightmare week was in truth a "police riot...

...Just a few days earlier, the remains of several young people (as this is written we do not yet know precisely how many) had been found in the ruins of a fashionable private dwelling in Greenwich Village...

...The peace movement has been victimized—temporarily—by the fraud of "Vietnamization...

...There was one moving moment when Davis, striving to justify his own stated desire to enlist a broad sector of opinion on his side (an objective scorned by Rubin and Hoffman in their emphasis on the children's hour) admitted that he was troubled by the hostility they often seemed to evoke...

...That there were some romantic hell-raisers in Chicago who welcomed the turbulence and helped to expand it is beyond dispute...

...Agnew and Mr...

...The White House remains haunted by the specter of George C. Wallace who —despite all the Administration's exercises in "Southern strategy"—continues to retain about the same popular base he held in the 1968 elections (about twelve to thirteen per cent of the electorate ). Prominent television commentators complain privately—and some of them even publicly—that Agnewism has created an atmosphere of creeping intimidation in the broadcasting realm...

...at other times they almost tittered with jubilant confidence that all the children of the nation were on their side, and the future in their grasp...

...The tragedy occurred in an interval when a new series of blasts—and scares—had begun to harass New York and other places...

...he saw that his militant pacifism was most likely to stir—and share—the conscience of the country...

...In fact a reading of any large section of the transcript (including the defense-oriented, selected excerpts in the book Tales of Hoffman) can only suggest to a rational inquirer that the trial was an extension of the national drama of mutual provocation now being waged by both the "revolutionary" wing of the New Left and the Agnew-Mitchell Right...

...And so its largest impact has been to fortify the stereotypes that Agnew and Mitchell are promoting...

...Mitchell and the President for whom both worked...

...Time and again throughout the long hour, the three were challenged to explain how they reconciled their rhetoric—and their current sanction of terrorism—with the overwhelming evidence that their behavior had become a strategic political weapon for Mr...

...On almost every level the Nixon Administration seems to be fulfilling the prophecy that it would be an Administration concerned with the care and feeding of the "un-poor," the "un-black," the "un-young," and, one might add, the unknowing...

...Our strategy," Rubin has proclaimed in a subsequent address, "was to give Judge Hoffman a heart attack...

...But despite the play-acting of Hoffman and the show-stealing of Rubin, who began the program by stridently insisting that the moderator cease and desist from any role in the production, there were melancholy and even macabre overtones in the studio...

...shrewdly detected the futility of striking out in blind protest...

...Perhaps I should parenthetically note that I agreed to appear on the program mentioned earlier precisely because I think it crucial to contest the notion that we must all sign up with either the legions of repression or the avant-garde of a "revolution" that has no significant relevance to the processes of change...

...for many weeks Averell Harri-man was almost a lonely voice among Democrats in challenging Mr...

...but what then happens to the contentions of defense attorney William Kunstler and others that all the turbulence of the trial was a product of Judge Hoffman's flagrant bias...

...Yet most of the country never understood the nature of the travesty—or the trial—and its knowledge has been further diminished by the behavior of the defendants and their mouthpieces in the weeks since the verdict (a verdict, by the way, that must be at least partially viewed as a victory for the jury system...

...National television on at least two occasions (the Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin shows) decided to exhibit Ab-bie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in combat with members of William Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, thus in effect giving weight to the spurious proposition that Americans must choose between voices of polarization...

...For one thing, the proximity—before and after as well as during the program—fortified my belief that it is a disastrous misconception to treat the so-called "New Left" as a monolithic mob...

...it was a valuable personal— and journalistic—experience and, despite a good deal of aberrational abuse (the program ended with Rubin twice shouting "James Wechsler is dead") I do not regret it...

...Now, in the second spring of his Administration, he finds himself calling for the death penalty for bombers and their accomplices...

...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page and a featured columnist for The New York Post...

...That is what Rubin confesses now...

...I do not need to be reminded that there are infinitely legitimate roots of frustration and desperation—and they are not restricted to the young...

...Nixon discarding anything that is affirmative in the celebrated Moynihan memoranda and responding only to the doctrine of "benign neglect...

...The Chicago case could have been an historic episode in the education of "middle America...

...All sides—from the judge and prosecution to attorney Kuntsler—were in continuous contempt of court, and the judge must necessarily bear heavy guilt for his contribution to lawlessness...

...This was primarily a "police riot," initially produced by Daley's resolve to impose inflammatory restrictions on the protesters and later intensified by his panic under fire...

...This was an echo of Daley's Chicago where Davis had been one of those who tried to negotiate conditions for peaceful protest, and it could not be brushed off lightly...

...Despite such awesome blunders as the designation of G. Harrold Carswell ("Can't,we find a really good mediocrity...

...Now, however, we have entered what some Marcusian proteges might describe as a "new phase" in their revolutionary careers—without, as far as I know, the sanction or guidance of their favorite theologian...

...As I wrote immediately afterwards, Davis is not Hoffman and Hoffman is neither Davis nor Rubin...

...Attorney Thomas A. Foran, who ran the Government show, delivered a public address describing the defendants as representatives of a "freaking-fag" revolution...

...What had heretofore been politically counter-productive had become literally self-destroying...

...So far that has usually been the case...

...That he was slain with his dream unfulfilled does not prove that he was wrong...

...Just a year ago, in this magazine, I wrote at some length of the dreary tendency of some of the followers of Herbert Marcuse, the activist Marxist philosopher who is the idol of the young radical left, to seek to deny elementary rights of speech to those with whom they differed, and to identify liberals as their "main enemy...

...It's necessary to have a real struggle of some kind before people will listen and reconsider their concept of what America is...

...The rationale for such adventurism was summarized by one of the bombers—his name understandably withheld ¦—in an article in Life magazine: "We are revolutionaries, not reformists...

...But who can decree the infallibility of time-bombs...

...I have no affectionate regard for Schwarz, whom Marcuse describes as a "hate-monger and rabble-rouser...

...its fruits are cruelly symbolized by the deaths of the kids playing with manufacture of bombs...