Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (25 page)

As the discussion grew heated during the rejoinder period that followed, the audience got into the act. There was lots of heckling, making it difficult for me to complete a sentence. Shouts of "racist" were audible. A member of the audience rubbed his fingers in the air as though holding a wad of bills, while he and several others accused me of selling out for money. It was a moment familiar to me from almost all my university appearances, when the importance of being a "public intellectual," beyond the control of the tenured left, was made eminently clear. For if I were inside an academic institution and dependent on it for my livelihood, my career would certainly be destroyed if I spoke out as I had.

Name-calling and
ad hominem
assaults, as I had come to appreciate, were indispensable weapons in the arsenal of the left. Fear of them was what kept people in line. "Over the whole of this worthy enterprise," Hilton Kramer writes of modern "liberalism," "there hovered a great fear-the fear of being thought 'reactionary,' the fear of being relegated to the Right. . . . The very thought of being accused of collaborating with 'reaction,' as it was still called, was a liberal nightmare, and there was no shortage of Stalinist liberals (as I believe they must be called) to bring the charge of 'reaction' . . . at every infraction, or suspected infraction, of 'progressive' doctrine." That was why at universities like UCLA, while private professional polls showed faculties to be evenly divided over race preferences, only a handful of professors have dared to publicly voice their opposition.

Maurice was embarrassed by the heckling and, to his credit, spoke in my defense. He recalled how as a young teaching assistant at Princeton at the end of the 1950s his own students had signed a petition to get him fired because of his views on the Vietnam War. He told the UCLA audience that they were engaged in the same type of behavior. Referring to me as "one of the most trenchant critics of the left," he advised them that when they were groaning at my remarks they couldn't hear what I had to say (as though that would bother them!). "It is precisely this," he added, "that David turns into a characterization of The Left, as though there really is such a monolith."

Here Maurice had hit the absolute center of the blind spot that has kept the left innocent of its effects. If there was no left, how could it do any of the things conservatives have accused it of doing? How could it dominate the culture or exclude conservatives even more effectively than McCarthyism had excluded leftists in the past? Obviously, it could not. This assumption (that there really is no left) explains why Jacoby and so many others could think such an idea incomprehensible.

Of course the left is not a monolith. But then it never has been-not even in the days of Lenin and Stalin. Today, the left includes civilized social democrats like Maurice Zeitlin, but also ideological fascists who will shout down a conservative speaker and threaten opponents with verbal terrorism and even physical violence.

Ward Connerly, a trustee of the University of California who has led the fight against racial preferences, has been prevented by leftist gangs from speaking at several major universities. These acts of incivility have been abetted by cowardly administrators who do not share the witch-hunting mentality of the demonstrators, but are unwilling to stand up to them. There is not a conservative faculty member lacking tenure at an American university who does not live in fear of possible termination for politically incorrect views. While Maurice can admirably chastise uncivil passions at a public forum, he nonetheless acquiesces in a political hiring process at his own university that ensures that conservatives will remain virtually invisible. Steve Wasserman may be a nuanced radical whose socializing generously includes political pariahs like myself, but he will still enforce their marginality in the pages of his own magazine, or at festivals he organizes. And Russell Jacoby may be capable of composing book-length critiques of his fellow leftists, but writing in the pages of the
Los Angeles Times
, he will casually dismiss as a paranoid delusion the view of one of America's leading conservative thinkers that he inhabits a culture that is controlled by hostile forces.

T
HE YEAR I998 was a time for the nostalgia artists of the left to remember their glory days of thirty years before, and the magic of a moment that many of them have never left. It was a time in their imaginations of lost innocence, when impossible dreams were brutally cut off by assassination and repression. For them, it was a time of progressive possibility that has left them stranded on the shores of a conservative landscape ever since.

A summary expression of such utopian regrets is found in Steve Talbot's ras documentary, "1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation." Talbot's narrative is shaped by radicals of the era like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, whom he interviews on camera. The choice of Gitlin and Hayden as authorities on the era is predictable for someone like Talbot, himself the veteran of a movement that promotes itself as an avatar of "participatory democracy" but closes off debate within its own ranks in a way worthy of the Communist regimes it once admired. Thus the
auteur
of "The Year That Shaped A Generation" excludes from this cinematic paean to his revolutionary youth any dissenters from inside the ranks of those who were there.

I myself am one such veteran who does not share Talbot's enthusiasm for 1968, nor his view of it as a fable of Innocents At Home. One explanation may be that I am ten years older than Talbot, and therefore know firsthand the state of our "innocence" then. Yet Gitlin and Hayden are also pre-boomers. An age gap cannot really explain the different views we have of what took place. Naturally, I would prefer to recall the glory days of my youth in a golden light, just like Gitlin and Hayden. For me, however, the era has been irreparably tarnished by actions and attitudes I vividly remember, but they prefer to forget.

The myth of innocence in Talbot's film, begins with President Lyndon Johnson's announcement in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Talbot was 19 years old and draft-eligible: "We were all like Yossarian in
Catch-22
," he recalls in an article written for Salon magazine reprising his documentary film. "We took this very personally. 'They' were trying to kill 'us.' But now Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle." The miracle, of course, was the democratic system, which the left had declared war on, but which had responded to the will of the people all the same. In 1968, radicals like us were calling for a "liberation" that would put an end to the system. For us the "system" was the enemy. But contrary to what Hayden, Gitlin, Talbot, and all the rest of us were saying at the time, the system worked. Looking back, we should all have defended it, and worked within it, instead of what we did do, which was to try to tear it down. Gitlin and Hayden have hedgingly (and
sotto voce
) acknowledged this fact but without judging their past actions accordingly. Talbot does not notice the difference. Nor does he reflect on the contradiction between what he and his comrades advocated then, and what everyone recognizes to be the case now.

The "they" Talbot refers to, and by which he means the government and the social establishment, were assuredly not trying to kill "us" in 1968. (Even in its retrospective voice, the narcissism of the boomer generation is impressive.) The attention of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were actually not on us but on the fate of Indochina. They had committed American forces to prevent the communist conquest of South Vietnam and Cambodia, and the bloodbath that we now
know
was in store for their inhabitants, should the communists win the war. As a result of the communist victory (and our efforts to make America lose), more people — more poor Indo-Chinese peasants — were killed by the marxist victors in the first three years of the communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the thirteen years of the anti-communist war. This is a fact that has caused some of us veterans of those years to reconsider our commitments and our innocence then. But not Talbot or the other nostalgists he has invited to make his film.

For them, the moral innocence of their comrades and themselves remains intact to this very day. According to them, their innocence was brutally ambushed when forces inherent in the system they hated conspired to murder the agents of their hope: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. And it was
only
that murder that caused them to become radicals at war with America. The year was 1968. "I experienced King's assassination as the murder of hope," writes Talbot, speaking for them all. In the film, Gitlin, whose history of the 1960s first announced this theme, remembers his similar thoughts at the time: "America tried to redeem itself and now they've killed the man who was taking us to the mountaintop." This is a false memory and there is something extremely distasteful in the fact that it is proposed by a historic participant like Gitlin. For, as Gitlin well knows, in the year 1968 neither he nor Tom Hayden, nor any serious New Left radical, thought of themselves as a liberal reformer or was still a follower of Martin Luther King.

One indicator of the self-conscious dissociation of radicals like Gitlin and Hayden from reformers like King is that neither of them, nor any other white student activist, sos leader, or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis for the demonstrations King was organizing in 1968 at the time he was killed.. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) could still be called a serious supporter of King in the year before he was assassinated. The new black heroes of the New Left were prophets of separatism and violence, like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, and the martyred Malcolm X. King had been unceremoniously toppled from the leadership of the civil rights movement two years before. The agendas of the radicals who pushed King aside were "black power" and revolutionary violence, and they had already replaced King's pleas for nonviolence and integration in the imaginations of the left.

Like other New Left leaders, Todd Gitlin was far from the idealistic liberal he impersonates in his book or Talbot's film. And like practically all in the New Left, Gitlin had (by his own admission) stopped voting in national elections as early as 1964 because, as the ses slogan put it, "the revolution is in the streets." To Gitlin and other New Leftists, the two parties were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the corporate ruling class. Activists, who saw themselves as revolutionaries against a "sham" democracy dominated by multinational corporations, were not going to invest hope in a leader like King whose political agenda was integration into the system, and who refused to join their war on the Johnson Administration, its imperialist adventures abroad and "tokenist" liberalism at home.

In Talbot's film, Hayden, too, embraces a doctrine of original innocence, but his disingenuous presentation of self involves fewer flat untruths than Gitlin's. He relies on subtle shadings and manipulations of the truth, a style of deception that became his political signature: "At that point," Hayden says of the King assassination, "I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn't know what would happen. Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I'd be imprisoned or killed."

The reality is that any "middle-class assumptions" held by Hayden — or any prominent ses activists-had already been chucked into the historical dustbin years before. Three out of four of the drafters of the famous 1962 Port Huron Statement were "red diaper babies" or marxists. The fourth was Hayden himself, who by his own account in his autobiography,
Reunion
, learned his politics in Berkeley in 1960 at the feet of children of the Old Left. (Hayden names Michael Tigar and Richard Flacks, in particular, as his mentors.) By 1965, ses president Carl Oglesby was proclaiming publicly, in a famous speech, that it was time to "name the System" that we all wanted to destroy. The name of the system was "corporate capitalism," and it was analyzed by SDS leaders in pretty much the same terms as in party texts read by the communist cadres in Moscow, Havana, and Hanoi.

Hayden was already calling the Black Panthers "America's Vietcong," and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic convention in Chicago that August. This pivotal event is described conveniently, but inaccurately, as a "police riot" in Talbot's film, Gitlin's book, and Hayden's own memoir which singularly fails to acknowledge his efforts to produce the eruption that ensued. Civil war in America was not something that was going to be imposed on the SDS revolutionaries from the outside or above, as Hayden disingenuously insinuates. Civil war was something that radicals — Hayden foremost among them — were trying to launch themselves.

Talbot continues his mythologizing of the spring of 1968 and the period just prior to the Chicago Riot by romanticizing the political ambitions of Bobby Kennedy, and mis-remembering how the left reacted to them: "Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of King's murder, new hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who had undergone a profound transformation from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for the dispossessed."

It is true, of course, that Bobby Kennedy made a feint in the direction of the anti-war crowd and more than one gesture on behalf of Cesar Chavez. It is also true that Hayden attended Kennedy's funeral and even wept a tear or two. But those tears had little to do with Hayden's political agendas at the time, which were more accurately summed up in Che Guevara's call to create "two, three, many Vietnams" inside America's borders. Hayden's tears for Kennedy were personal, and he paid a huge political price for them among his revolutionary comrades who were not overly impressed by Kennedy's sudden political "transformation." After the funeral, SDS activists wondered out loud, and in print, whether Hayden had "sold out" by mourning a figure whom they saw not as the great white hope of the political struggle that consumed their lives, but as a Trojan horse for the other side.