THE NEW RADICALS

ONLY five or six years ago, to call someone a radical in America seemed quaint and was largely meaningless. Most of the radical proposals of a generation before had become Government policy, and even Communism seemed to have turned relatively conservative. Today, thanks to that amorphous band known as the New Radicals, the word has at least some measure of fresh meaning.

The Old Left had a program for the future; the New Left's program is mostly a cry of rage. The Old Left organized and proselyted, playing its part in bringing about the American welfare state. But it is precisely big government, the benevolent Big Brother, that the New Left is rebelling against. Says Author Paul Jacobs, an Old Leftist himself: "We were rejecting a depression; they're rejecting affluence."

The New Radicals have no power base. Their number, while indeterminate, is obviously small. Still, they are a presence and a voice--partly because of the sheer energy of their commitment, which demands not just parlor protest but physical inconvenience as expressed in the sit-in, the demonstration, the march. They speak for the beleaguered individual in an impersonal society--whether Negro sharecropper, white welfare recipient, or campus dropout. Above all, they speak, or shout, against the Viet Nam war. Says Sociologist Daniel Bell: "At best, the New Left is all heart. At worst, it is no mind." They changed the temper, the tone and to some extent the terms of political debate. The question is what function or future they have beyond that.

You Can Always Hate Dad

Who are they? Given their almost anarchist horror of formal organization, they are difficult to identify. They are mostly young, bright, from well-to-do, often liberal families. They are creatures of conscience, the children of men of conscience, and they regard their patrimony as a reproach. The largest and most permanent of the shifting New Left groups is the Students for a Democratic Society (some 30,000 members by rough count), whose president changes every year, and whose members once even considered abolishing the office. Originally part of the left-wing but anti-Communist League for Industrial Democracy, the S.D.S. soon began to strike out on its own. In 1962, at a meeting at Port Huron, Mich., 43 representatives of more than a dozen universities and colleges adopted a lengthy manifesto attacking the quality of American life and the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Besides S.D.S., the New Left includes other small groups, largely consisting of individuals with a surrounding cluster of followers. There is, of course, Mario Savio, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, but his stature has faded along with the issue. The more stable heroes in the New Left's pantheon are Staughton Lynd, 38, a pacifist and professor of American history at Yale between speaking engagements, and Tom Hayden, 27, an S.D.S. founder who now heads the independent Newark Community Union Project, a small but energetic program to help the poor. Both attracted a lot of attention a year ago when they went on a self-appointed peace mission to Hanoi. While the New Left scorns conventional politics, it has set up an ambitiously titled National Conference for New Politics, which has backed candidates in local elections, and helped win a seat in the Georgia legislature for Julian Bond, a founder of S.N.C.C.

The movement has spawned some dozen magazines and newspapers, including the sensationalist Ramparts and the more intellectual Studies on the Left. The lesser publications appear erratically, when the editors happen to have the money, and tend to be studded by advertisements for psychedelic happenings and underground movies and interviews with Allen Ginsberg or Timothy Leary. They also offer lots of free verse on the joys of copulation, distinguished from John Donne's comparable rhapsodies by a self-conscious injection of four-letter words doggedly intended to shock. The movement's bard is Bob Dylan (when in doubt, New Leftists always sing). But on the whole the New Left distrusts the hippies and the beats, who want to drop out of society.

The New Left label is applied to various organizations that do not necessarily accept it. While most New Leftists still embrace S.N.C.C. and CORE, the embrace is one-sided; the leaders of those organizations, with their new drive for black power, have frozen whites out. Most New Leftists claim as their spiritual ancestors Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman rather than Marx or Lenin. Thus they are distinct from the various Communist and socialist groups descended from the old, pre-World War II left, though they share many of their aims and indiscriminately welcome their presence in any sit-in, teach-in or bein. Chief among these Marxist-oriented groups are the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs (membership 3,000), who still chatter about the class struggle and, unlike S.D.S., believe in working through coalitions with liberal forces to achieve their aims. A sympathetic historian of the New Left, Author Jack Newfield, declares sweepingly: "DuBois members are just not hung-up by the same things S.D.S.ers are. They don't make embarrassing speeches about how we must love each other. They are not viscerally outraged by the moral deceits of society in the way S.D.S. members are; they are not in total rebellion. The key difference is that the DuBois Club members don't hate their fathers; S.D.S.ers do."

The New Left is determined not to cooperate with groups that have even slightly bowed to the status quo. When Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin suggested that the New Left shift from protest to coalition politics and work with labor and liberals, he was berated as a cop-out who was threatening its moral purity. Michael Harrington, who put poverty on the map in his book The Other America, is now similarly denounced; he calls the New Leftists "mystical militants."

The New Left's chief enemy, so declared, is not the far right but rather what it calls "the liberal Establishment" or "corporate liberalism." Hayden argues that the social legislation of the New Deal has enslaved the poor and left them worse off than they were before. Demands Parrel Broslawsky, professor of history at Los Angeles Valley College and recent candidate for the state legislature: "Who are the judges who participate in legal lynchings? The appointees of flaming liberals like President Kennedy. Who perpetuates racism? The unions. Who votes for war? The good liberal Congressmen. Who perpetuates alienation? The liberal administrators like Clark Kerr. The liberals are gutless, pusillanimous and totally lacking in sincerity." He adds: "Listening to them is like being beaten to death with a warm sponge."

Some Call It Rape

The liberals return the compliment. As Critic Irving Howe puts it, the New Leftists show "an unconsidered enmity toward something vaguely called the Establishment, an equally unreflective belief in the 'decline of the West,' a crude, unqualified anti-Americanism, drawn from every source."

The New Leftists often act as if they had no memory and had read no history; they seem unaware of the Communist-organized rebellions in Greece and Malaya, the invasion of South Korea, the repression of the Hungarian uprising, the Berlin Wall. While they are theoretically opposed to any dictatorship they endlessly make allowances for Communist regimes; they feel outraged by U.S. leaders while either apologizing for or extolling Castro and Mao, and of course they want instant, unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam, heedless of the consequences. "We refuse to be anti-Communist," declared Lynd and Hayden in a statement written for Studies on the Left, since the term is used "to justify a foreign policy that is no more sophisticated than rape."

The recurrent theme is that there must be purity at home first, that the U.S. must heal its own sick society before it can presume to treat others. What, then, do the New Leftists prescribe for the U.S.? They know what they do not want, but not necessarily what they want. Typical is a statement by Clark Kissinger, 26, a former S.D.S. national secretary who ran for alderman in Chicago (and won 864 votes out of 18,-970): "You can imagine the system as a table. Lyndon Johnson sits at the head of the table, labor has a place at the table, industry has a place, the building industry, the .grape growers, the State Street merchants--they all have places. Right now, the poor don't sit at the table; they get some crumbs thrown down to them. Well, we don't want a place at the table. We want to turn it upside down."

When asked what they would do once the table is overturned, the New Radicals mostly reply that this does not concern them. They have no program, and they do not want one. The immediate problem is to discredit and destroy the old society. Let others worry about the details of rebuilding later. But, when pressed, many of the New Left members do state their expectations. These ideas are not systematized and come from many different spokesmen; still, something like a New Left vision of the future emerges.

Yearning for the Past

The vision is Utopian and full of inner contradictions. In a general way, the New Radicals would nationalize basic industry, although some would only tax it more heavily. "The rich" would also be taxed to the point of doing away with big private fortunes. "We must abolish the competitive ethic," says S.D.S. President Nick Egleson. "Do we want to make 8,000,000 cars a year if we are ruining the lives of the people who are making them?" But, while New Leftists loathe capitalism, they assume that the miraculous U.S. economy will go right on turning out wealth no matter what is done to it. Everyone, in the phrase of a New Leftist, will "have money or credit, whether he is able to work or not." Everyone will be guaranteed medical care and education; some suggest 24-hour schools, for children by day, for the parents by night.

Some see the Federal Government as the chief source of all the necessary funds--though they detest the government and, with almost states'-righters' fervor, would curb the federal role in society. Here, as well as in its hostility toward liberals, is where the New Left joins the New Right, including the Young Americans for Freedom (membership: 30,000). They both distrust big government, want to curb its interference in local and private affairs. Individual spokesmen for both right and left have even suggested abolishing the draft, though for very different reasons. (Some New Leftists want to eliminate armies altogether.) They both favor voluntary activities, including private or neighborhood-controlled education, police and social services. But there are differences. The New Left thinks of the poor as victims and believes that the conservatives think of them only as failures. The New Leftists have a mystical faith in the purity and wisdom of the poor, "uncorrupted" by the Establishment--an idea that the New Right rejects as nonsense.

The New Leftists resemble Russia's 19th century narodniks (populists), mostly middle-class students, who idealized the peasants and went to live among them, trying to rouse them to action. The overriding dream of the New Left is "participatory democracy," which means, among other things, that workers should have a vote on the running of their plants, students on what they should be taught, and the poor (as long as there are any) on welfare programs. To make this possible, life must center on small communities, cities must be broken up. Scratch Utopia and you find nostalgia: the New Leftists really look backward, to a time of small social units and close personal relations. With yearnings for an almost medieval setting, they want to repeal bigness--which some men have been hankering to do ever since the Industrial Revolution. In News from Nowhere, William Morris visualized a new London broken up into idyllic villages. Charles Fourier and Robert Owen envisioned small, self-sufficient communities, inspiring such American Utopian experiments as Brook Farm and New Harmony. Sometimes the New Left's vision sounds like New Harmony-computerized. Says James Weinstein, an editor of Studies on the Left: "People will meet in little communities and decide what they want. All their desires will be fed into the computers, which will pass their needs on to the industries." Many of the New Left's current projects are surprisingly small-scale, such as the "free universities" and other "parallel institutions" which it has improvised as alternatives to existing ones. Hayden lists his top aims as "rent control, play streets, apartment repairs, higher welfare payments, jobs."

Something else the New Leftists have in common with other Utopians is a remarkably detailed concern for the physical environment. They dream of "the total beautiful society" with smogless air, unpolluted rivers, swift and clean public transportation and, in the phrase of Atlanta Lawyer Howard Moore, "airlines carrying the people all over the country to the great museums." Paul Goodman, 55, one of the aging gurus of the New Left, spends much time visualizing how city streets could be turned into playgrounds or parks, and how motor cars could be barred from Manhattan (the last being an idea that should do a lot to win friends for the New Left).

Ultimately, the New Leftists, like all Utopians, not only want to reform society: they really want to reform human nature. They want men to work not for gain or glory but for the satisfaction of contributing to the general good. In a broad sense, the movement is not political at all but religious. "We want to create a world in which love is more possible," says an S.D.S leader, Carl Oglesby. For all their rant and naivete, the New Radicals can sound strongly appealing. The fact that many of their proposals are impractical and that they lack a program is not an ultimate argument against them. Critics may perform a service to a society by pointing out evil and injustice without necessarily offering alternatives. Some of the things the New Left says about modern American life need to be said and evoke certain echoes in anyone who has ever been in white-hot anger over a slum, or a traffic jam, or a piece of blatant official hypocrisy, or a TV commercial, or has felt alone in a big organization.

Wanted: Middle-Aged Leftists'

The trouble is that even in the role of merely negative or gadfly critics, the New Radicals are too mindless. In the words of one New Left manifesto, they want to remain "permanently radical"--which is about as possible as remaining permanently young. Their refusal to make common cause with liberals and other reformers, their dedication to action rather than thought, emotion rather than reason, will almost surely destroy what influence they have. Some are already disillusioned: protest demonstrations are not changing the Viet Nam situation, and the civil rights movement is not only stalled but increasingly hostile to them. Their leaders say that they will now concentrate on community action, and wistfully speak of a coalition of the universities and the poor--but that will not work either. The poor are not radical. What they really want to be is middleclass, and once they buy a car and make a down payment on a house, they will ignore the New Left and stick with their unions or political parties.

Says Staughton Lynd: "The key question is whether the movement will grow beyond its student base and produce men who will carry their radicalism into middle age and beyond." The New Left leaders are afraid of the American talent for assimilating dissent--and this is already happening to some of their ideas. Practically everybody has a kind word for decentralization, in the interests of efficiency if not humanity; the war on poverty, while now bogged down, will be carried on. Even the guaranteed annual wage is not beyond the capacity of modern industrial society. Thus quite a few of the New Left proposals, in modified form, will be taken over by the liberals and by the managers. As for the New Left's anger at the human condition, its yearning for love, these will, as always, be taken over by the poets, the preachers, and perhaps a few minor saints. The present New Left will undoubtedly fade without producing many middle-aged radicals. But it will have performed a function. There should always be a New Left--to drive conventional society to a constant, sometimes painful review of its own values.

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