crew-cut radicals
GOLDBERG, JONAH
Crew-cut Radicals "Young Americans for Freedom" in the Sixties By Jonah Goldberg Throughout the "Ike Age" of the 1950s, the Left simmered while the Right seethed. Eisenhower's popularity, coupled...
...With the arrival of the 1960s, both ends of the political spectrum came to a boil—with the Right heating up first...
...The Sharon conference was held at Buckley's estate, and the Sharon Statement was drafted at the direction of Evans and Meyer, which probably explains why it was so well written and concise (the Port Huron Statement runs about 50 pages, Sharon under 370 words...
...The Left has masterfully spun the colossal mess it made of the universities and other institutions—as the serious politics of the 1960s...
...The Port Huron Statement, meanwhile, begins with a certain lazy honesty about its self-indulgence: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit...
...If you believe the Bolsheviks are at your door, you don't have time for bong hits...
...Leftist radicals could afford to be self-indulgent, their vision unconstrained...
...As Oscar Wilde once observed, "In America, the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience...
...While left-wing protest politics were wreaking havoc on institutions and individuals, a band of committed young conservative men and women were "getting away with" their own revolu-tion—by dedicating themselves to the painstaking restoration of some very old ideas and applying them to a society in flux...
...Head yippie Abbie Hoffman once observed that the first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it...
...And as Andrew notes, many conservatives have bought this interpretation...
...Furthermore, YAF was considerably more blue collar than SDS, whose members were more privileged and held a decidedly elitist view of their role in the world...
...After all, most of the radical leftists of the 1960s climbed down off the shoulders of giants, rejecting the wisdom of centuries in favor of . . . what...
...But at long last, the revisionism has begun...
...This explains some of YAF's cultural obscurity, and a shortcoming of Andrew's book...
...government had the wealth and expertise to do anything it wanted, and that the Soviet Union was as often as not the wronged party in the Cold War...
...Therefore, Todd Gitlin's bestselling book The Sixties makes for more entertaining reading than, say, George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945...
...Thus, John A. Andrew's The Other Side of the Sixties provides a valuable service...
...Generational conflicts are by definition negligible in a movement dedicated above all to the "eternal truths...
...What Andrew demonstrates is the extent to which the young men and women of YAF were willing to do their homework, rather than make it up as they went along...
...Andrew endeavors to include all of these elements, but he is stuck with YAF as the dog, instead of the tail...
...YAF had approximately as many members as SDS...
...But Andrew demonstrates that the Jonah Goldberg is producer of the national PBS series Think Tank...
...The opening line of the Sharon Statement reads, "In this time of moral and political crisis, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths...
...There were, of course, some very serious people on the left—Gitlin, a former SDS president, was one of them—but generally left-wing radicals behaved as if their parents were out of town, while conservatives acted as if they were on their first summer job at their dad's office...
...decade included far more than left-radical agitation...
...Young conservatives believed that communism was a very real threat abroad and that the leviathan state was metastasizing at home...
...That is why a discussion of YAF is impossible without an examination of National Review, the purging from respectable conservatism of the John Birch Society, the Faustian embrace of the traditionalists and the Randians, and the pitched battle of the Goldwaterites and the Nixonites...
...Andrew's meticulous research unnecessarily bleeds the drama and personality out of this story of conservative visionaries...
...It could be that YAF set out to clean house and SDS, eventually, to burn it down...
...About Students for a Democratic Society and other organizations in the leftist orbit, we have heard much...
...Indeed, SDS's call to arms—the Port Huron Statement —is required reading in many college political-science courses...
...The YAFers, not the SDSers, sounded the louder alarm...
...The greater disservice of the book is that Andrew takes what is an exciting story about the power of ideas and the people who champion them and turns it into an exceedingly dull one about internal memo-writing...
...But about Young Americans for Freedom— vanguard of the Right—we have heard little...
...The real mystery is why anyone swallowed the other line in the first place...
...In a sense, YAF really did have founding fathers...
...The conservatives had no such luxury...
...Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich have been among the chief endorsers of this notion...
...Meanwhile, with their ideas capturing the field at home and abroad, their right-wing counterparts have reason to relax a bit, in acknowledgment of victory achieved...
...It was in 1960 that YAF convened in Sharon, Connecticut, to decide on its principles...
...YAF—unlike SDS, SNCC, the Black Panthers, and the rest—was an organization largely directed by its elders...
...Why were the devotees of Russell Kirk routed by those of Herbert Mar-cuse...
...Eisenhower's popularity, coupled with his acceptance of the New Deal, made true-believing conservatives feel like Christians in ancient Rome...
...But, thankfully, he is only one of a new cadre of academics investigating the conservative movement's long march to victory in the battle of ideas...
...YAF organized earlier, and perhaps better, than SDS...
...This is the real historical curiosity...
...Almost since the founding, America's students have tried to grab the steering wheel from the back seat...
...SDS did not hold its conclave in Port Huron, Michigan, until two years later...
...In short, they had to be grown-ups, and hence a little boring...
...Thirty years later, after ruining much and building little, leftist radicals have few accomplishments to look back on with pride...
...The achievements of YAF's student leaders—then and now— should not be diminished, but the story of YAF largely concerns Buckley and the National Review conservatives...
...Andrew points out that the Left and Right have worked together to propagate a particular image of the 1960s—that it was a time of left-wing protest politics...
...William F Buckley Jr., William Rusher, M. Stanton Evans, Frank Meyer, and PR guru Marvin Lieb-man gave birth to the group and nurtured it...
...But a deeper answer may lie in the competing visions of the two camps...
...A communal adhocracy driven by the mantra "If it feels good, do it...
...Each side had its youthful shock troops...
...After all, they believed the U.S...
...And it is the authors of the Port Huron Statement who reside in syllabi alongside the men who wrote the Federalist Papers...
...The founders of YAF were dedicated to the "wisdom of the ancients...
Vol. 2 • August 1997 • No. 47
