Slouching Towards Gomorrah (9 page)

Nihilism was the order of the decade. It came in two varieties: hedonism and political rage. Some students or dropouts exhibited both. The Hippies rejected middle-class morality for an unprecedented permissiveness. The incessantly repeated slogans were taken seriously: “If it feels good, do it,” “Do your own thing,” and “It is forbidden to forbid.” The symbol of this attitude was, of course, the Woodstock festival, where half a million youths camped in the rain and mud to listen to rock music, take drugs, and engage in sex. That, too, was celebrated by a similar gathering on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first: this time, farce was repeated as farce.

Radical groups, even as they grew more violent in their effort to destroy the white, bourgeois world, were without any notion of what was to come after. As one of the apostles of violence put it, “The idea was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior third world…. [P]eople shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.”
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It may yet.

The Sixties were, as Robert Nisbet wrote, “a decade of near revolutionary upheaval and of sustained preaching of social nihilism.”
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Except that it was even worse than that. Unlike any
previous decade in American experience, the Sixties combined domestic disruption and violence with an explosion of drug use and sexual promiscuity; it was a decade of hedonism and narcissism; it was a decade in which popular culture reached new lows of vulgarity. The Sixties generation combined moral relativism with political absolutism. And it was the decade in which the Establishment not only collapsed but began to endorse the most outrageous behavior and indictments of America by young radicals. It was the decade that saw victories for the civil rights movement, but it was also the decade in which much of America’s best educated and most pampered youth refused to serve the country in war, disguising self-indulgence and hatred of the United States as idealism. What W. H. Auden said of the 1930s was even more true of the 1960s: it was “a low, dishonest decade.”
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The message and the mood of the Sixties did not, of course, remain safely within the universities.

They didn’t go just into the universities. The radicals were not likely to go into business or the conventional practice of the professions. They were part of the chattering class, talkers interested in policy, politics, and culture. They went into politics, print and electronic journalism, church bureaucracies, foundation staffs, Hollywood careers, public interest organizations, anywhere attitudes and opinions could be influenced. And they are exerting influence. The view that radical faculties, for example, are not influencing students is the “Goldman Sachs Fallacy.” In a question period after I had given a talk, a young man said he had taught at Yale for a brief
period and, despite radical faculty members’ attempts at indoctrination, most of his students wanted jobs at some place like Goldman Sachs, the investment bankers. He overlooked the fact that he probably did not draw radicals to his course. I pointed out that those graduates who went to Goldman Sachs would play little or no part in shaping the culture. Some of them may continue counter-cultural drug sniffing and sexual promiscuity in their off hours, but that is not the same thing as actively proselytizing for Sixties views. Those who are reached by radical professors would, like those professors, join faculties or take up other culture-shaping careers. It may be that the Left can perpetuate itself forever on our cultural heights by continuing to dominate the universities and indoctrinating its share of the young.

Because of the universities’ expansion, this might have occurred in any event, but more slowly. The Sixties compounded the problem. An entire generation of students carried a more virulent form of intellectual class attitudes and cynicism about this society into a range of occupations outside the universities. The transformation of the
New York Times
illustrates what has happened to prestige journalism generally. A newspaper once called “the good, gray lady” is now suffused with Sixties attitudes, which are most explicit, of course, in its editorial and opinion pages, though they can be detected as well in its news pages. Similarly, Hollywood, which once celebrated traditional virtues, has become a propaganda machine for the political outlook and permissive morality of the Sixties generation. If the universities have become permanent enclaves of Sixties culture, and continue feeding converted students into such fields, this may be a permanent feature of our intellectual and artistic communities.

It is commonly said that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared. “Has there ever been such politically barren radicalism as that of the Sixties?” Columnist George Will wrote, “…The Sixties are dead. Not a moment too soon.”
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Would that it were so, but the truth, alas, is otherwise. The New Left did collapse as a political movement because of its internal incoherence and amorphous program, and because its revolutionary rhetoric and proclivity for violence repelled most Americans. There never was any chance that this collection of frantic youths could become or instigate a popular movement. What we see in modern liberalism, however, may be the ultimate triumph of the New Left.

Its adherents did not go away or change their minds; the New Left shattered into a multitude of single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual organizations, multiculturalists, and new or freshly radicalized organizations such as People for the American Way, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Planned Parenthood.

Each of these pursues a piece of the agenda of the cultural and political Left, but they do not announce publicly an overarching program, as the New Left did, that would enable people to see that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical philosophy. Yet these groups are in touch with one another and often come together in a coalition on specific issues. The splintering of the New Left proved to be an advantage because the movement became less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than was the case in the Sixties.

As the rioting and riotousness died down in the early 1970s and seemingly disappeared altogether in the last half of that decade and in the 1980s, it seemed, at last, that the Sixties were over. They were not. It was a malignant decade that, after a fifteen-year remission, returned in the 1980s to metastasize more devastatingly throughout our culture than it had in the Sixties, not with tumult but quietly, in the moral and political assumptions of those who now control and guide our major cultural institutions. The Sixties radicals are still with us, but now they do not paralyze the universities; they run the universities.

If the problem were only the universities and the chattering classes, there might be reason to be more optimistic. The Sixties have gone further than that, however. “The New Lefts anti-institutional outlook and anti-bourgeois value scheme has fed into the ‘new liberalism’ increasingly held by the upper middle class. Indeed, the ‘radical’ values and orientations expressed by SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and SDS workers in the early sixties have become the conventional wisdom of college-educated urban professionals, especially those under thirty-five…. Whatever their other successes and failures, the youthful radicals of that decade propelled a new set of values from
the fringes to the very midst of contemporary social conflict.”
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That was written in 1982. It seems even more true today.

Thus, the themes and traits of the New Left have become prominent in today’s culture. As will be seen throughout this book, the Sixties generation’s fixation on equality has permeated our society and its institutions, much to our disadvantage. Their idea of liberty has now become license in language, popular culture, and sexuality.

The idea that everything is ultimately political has taken hold. We know its current form as “political correctness,” a distemper that afflicts the universities in their departments of humanities, social sciences, and law. Works of literature are read for their subtexts, usually existing only in the mind of the politically correct reader, about the oppression of women, Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism. Political correctness is not confined to the enclaves of the academy. It is now to be found in museums, art galleries, seminaries, foundations…all the institutions relating to opinion and attitude formation.

A corollary to the politicization of the culture is the tactic of assaulting ones opponents as not merely wrong but morally evil. That was, of course, a key stratagem of the New Left, and it remains a crucial weapon in modern liberalisms armory. The rioters in the streets did not criticize the universities as in need of reform but as institutions rotten with immorality from top to bottom. Critics of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan were not said to be mistaken but were denounced as greedy pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and insurance companies out to protect their illicit profits.

The student radicals’ habitual lying is easily enough explained. They were antinomians. Just as those Christian heretics thought themselves freed by God’s grace from any obligation to the moral law, so the student radicals, imbued with the political grace of the Left, were freed of the restraints of law and morality. It could not be immoral to lie in a noble cause. For the same reason, it could not be wrong to break laws or heads.

Modern liberals, being in charge of the institutions they once attacked, have no need to break heads and only an occasional need to break laws. They do, however, have a need to lie, and do so abundantly, since many Americans would not like their actual agenda.

One of the New Left’s ambitions was to move the Democratic Party further to the left of the American center, to convert it to a more radical stance from the traditional liberal-labor ideology the party had espoused since Franklin Roosevelt built his coalition. Historian Terry H. Anderson, a rather uncritical admirer of the New Left, claims that the Democrats embraced the ideas expressed in the
Port Huron Statement.
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There is much truth in that. Certainly student radicals provided the McGovern cadres that took the party left in 1972. Later, as Capitol Hill staffers and elected congressmen, they moved the congressional Democrats well to the left of most Americans who consider themselves Democrats. The parties are aligning themselves along the lines of the war in the culture. Issues such as abortion, flag burning, special homosexual rights, feminism (including women in combat), quotas and affirmative action, the direction of welfare reform, all of these and more already are or are coming to be issues that divide Congress along party lines. The perception that the Democrats are on the wrong side of some of these issues helps to explain the political successes of the Republicans in recent years.

But the primary effect of the Sixties generation is in the realm of culture, as the following chapters seek to demonstrate. Politics may have little effect on elite culture and hence little impact on what is taught in schools and universities or on the reinstitution of the restraints of religion, morality, and law that once gave us classical liberalism instead of the modern variety.

It is troubling to realize that the Sixties merely gave enormous acceleration to trends that had been in place for some time. It may well be that we would ultimately have arrived where we are if the Sixties had never happened. We might, on the other hand, have recognized the problems at a less virulent stage and have been able to deal with them more effectively if the Sixties had not crashed down upon America and overwhelmed us. For those who dislike what we are becoming, the task is not merely to resist but to attack the many manifestations of corruption and restore something of what we once were. That will not be easy: the formulations of the Sixties are now deeply embedded in our opinion-forming institutions and our culture.

In the end, the spirit of Port Huron triumphed: it did change the world. Whether that change is permanent remains to be seen.

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