Slouching Towards Gomorrah (6 page)

“The final session [drafting the
Statement
] lasted all night and then the delegates walked down to Lake Huron; some held hands as they watched the sun rise. ‘It felt like the dawn of a new age,’” one of them said, ‘“It was exalting…. We thought we knew what had to be done, and that we were going to do it.’”
²⁹

In the Sixties the spirit and the exaltation expressed at Port Huron played out across the country and produced a massive lurch to the left among university students. SDS grew from 600 members in 1963 to over 100,000 in 1968, but then collapsed in 1969 into hostile factions and in the end consisted only of a small group of Maoists. SDS had been the center of the New Left, but contrary to some’ accounts,
³⁰
the shattering of SDS did not mean the collapse of the New Left. The New Left was a confused and confusing movement of radicals lacking any fixed center. After 1969, it remained that for several years more. This was simply an uncritically anti-American leftishness, not at all like the disciplined and programmatic older Left, exemplified by the Communist Party. Being unprogrammatic, the New Left’s ideas of where they wanted to take the nation ran the gamut of leftist sentiments from amorphous to vaporous. They did not have doctrine; they had youth, self-righteousness, euphoria, and, many of them, ultimately, fury.

The young are naturally romantic and given to moral absolutes that necessarily make the real world of compromises, half-measures, and self-seeking appear corrupt. A youth culture, particularly in times of rapid social change, like the Sixties, is likely to develop a passionate adherence to principle, and the principles for a new age and a better world were at hand in articulations of the liberal elders. But the elders had not taken those principles seriously enough; they had compromised. The Sixties young were, therefore, in opposition not only to the
larger society in general but to traditional liberals in particular.
^†

Their politics was expressive of attitudes rather than practical means to a stated goal. They regularly announced a “revolution” but, a few Weathermen terrorists aside, did little more than disrupt, confront, destroy property, paralyze universities, denounce America, and scream obscenities. “Relatively unconcerned with the long-term consequences of their actions, the New Left student movement appeared ready to attack all existing structures, including the university, and to use tactics which alienated the majority, in order to make manifest their contempt, their total rejection of the intolerable world created by their elders.”
³¹
The New Left may have practiced a politics of expression and self-absorption, but that did not mean the politics was innocuous. To the contrary, it did serious, lasting, and perhaps permanent damage to valuable institutions, socially stabilizing attitudes, and essential standards.

The revolt was against the entire American culture. The United States, it was said, was engaged in an immoral war only because the United States itself was deeply immoral, being racist, sexist, authoritarian, and imperialistic. The arrangements of the liberal capitalist order were themselves illegitimate, conferring power where none was deserved and withholding power from the poor and minorities. The bourgeois class, which sustained and benefitted from these societal arrangements, was, therefore, oppressive. It followed that bourgeois morality and standards of excellence were
part of the apparatus that supported the status quo and repressed the individual. Destruction was, therefore, the only legitimate response.

That is what I did not understand as I stood over the smoldering books outside the Yale law school.

2

T
hat was the authentic voice of adolescent Sixties radicalism…impatient, destructive, nihilistic. Modern liberalism is its mature stage. The temporary abeyance of the Sixties temper was due to the radicals graduating from the universities and becoming invisible until they reached positions of power and influence, as they now have, across the breadth of the culture. They no longer have need for violence or confrontation: since the radicals control the institutions they formerly attacked, the Sixties temper manifests itself in subtler but no less destructive ways.

What the radicals did in the Sixties illuminates their mood and goals today. How the besieged “Establishment” responded tells a great deal about the softness and self-doubt that had come to afflict American cultural leaders even before they were assailed. We are currently being fed revisionist histories that paint student rebellion and hedonism of that time as idealism and excitement. No doubt that is partly due to the nostalgia of the Sixties generation for a
time when everything seemed possible. But the revisionism also serves to consolidate the Left’s cultural victories of that decade. Rewritten history has always been a weapon in the struggle for control of the present and the future. The true version of what took place is to be consigned to the memory hole. The radicalism of those times, we are informed, was a reaction against the cold war culture of the Fifties by idealistic students who sought to break free of the deadening intellectual conformity, spiritual emptiness, and social injustices of their parents’ generation. The truth, as any accurate account of the times makes plain, is otherwise.

One of the more egregious pieces of revisionism appeared, appropriately enough, in a
New York Times
editorial, “In Praise of the Counterculture.”
²
The
Times
, whose editorial page and some of its regular columns seem to have been handed over to a group of unregenerate Sixties radicals, remarks of that decade: “Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition.” If that statement is accurate, and it may well be, then, as the state of our current culture attests, the American intellectual tradition has a lot to answer for. The
Times
even manages to say that the decade’s “summery, hedonistic ethos then and now reduced modern puritans to fits of twisting discomfort. America is still close enough to the frontier experience of relentless work and danger to view any kind of fun with suspicion.” That is an exceedingly odd description of a society positively addicted to fun: television sitcoms, sensational motion pictures, rock and rap music, recreational sex and drugs, spectator and participatory sports, Disneyland vacations. The “fun” viewed with suspicion then and now involved such “summery” pastimes as hard drug use and sexual anarchy. To cap this litany of Sixties-era fatuities, the editorial solemnly pronounces that the counterculture is “part of us, a legacy around which Americans can now unite, rather than allow themselves to be divided.” There is no possibility that Americans will unite around that legacy. Those of us who regard the Sixties as a disaster are not “allowing” ourselves to be divided; we
insist
on it. Opposition to the counterculture, the culture that became today’s liberalism, is precisely what our culture war is about.

Perhaps more books have been written about the Sixties than
any other decade in American history with the exception of times of war or the decade of the Great Depression. Some of those books have been analytical, some factual, most are admiring. But there is a different story to tell, and that story focuses on the universities, for it was there that the cadres of the new liberalism first appeared.

The campus madness may have started at Berkeley, but “it was the Ivy League that was ultimately to set the pace in the retreat of reason.”
³
When the first demonstrations broke out at Yale, a visiting professor pointed out that it was organized by a transfer student from Berkeley. At every university, he said, the first eruptions could be traced to a radical who had “come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Berkeley.” Yale had for years been politically liberal, no department more so than the law school. I was one of two Republicans on a faculty of about forty-five. When it was proposed that we hire a man who might possibly have been a third, he was rejected, one faculty member remarking that he would “tip the balance.”

But liberal as it was, Yale was unprepared for the shock when student radicals first appeared in our midst. We knew of the riots at places like Berkeley and Columbia, but that was not the same as seeing irrational fury face to face. The change at the law school began abruptly with the class that entered in 1967. Unlike the traditional liberal students of the second-and third-year classes, whom they frightened as much as they dismayed the faculty, these students were angry, intolerant, highly vocal, and case-hardened against logical argument.

Two decades before their leftist orthodoxy had been given a name, this group developed a rigid “political correctness” of its own. In the first-year course on constitutional law, I led one student through a conventional analysis of an aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in which he reached the only coherent and legally non-controversial conclusion possible. (I think it was that the amendment prohibited only official and not private action.) About ten minutes later he raised his hand, was recognized, rose from his front-row seat, turned to his fellow students, and said, “I want to apologize to the class for reaching the conclusion I did.
I must have sounded like Attila the Hun.” He resumed his seat and waited for me to proceed with whatever topic was then under discussion. The class showed no sign that anything unusual had happened. Neither then nor afterward did he explain what was wrong with the reasoning that led to the conclusion; the latter was just not acceptable politically, and that was that. When last heard of, he was a professor of law. No doubt he is indoctrinating his students in non-Tatar constitutional theory.

The entry of another politicized class in 1968 gave the radicals effective control of the student body. I was on sabbatical leave that academic year, but upon returning in 1969 I saw the entry of a third such class and a law school becoming an intellectual and pedagogical shambles. At Yale, as elsewhere, part of the faculty began to side with the students. Some professors were radicals themselves, a few were emotionally unstable, some needed student approval and would do whatever was necessary to keep it, others simply withdrew or went into denial. This was characteristic of all the university departments outside the hard sciences. The administration, thoroughly intimidated, refused to get involved. All of which meant that effective faculty resistance was impossible. The results were calamitous.

Turmoil was the order of the day…student strikes, arson in university buildings (three episodes in the law school alone), angry demonstrations, classroom disruptions, rejection of rationality as reactionary, obscenities shouted at faculty members, the usual assortment of barbarities. There were a few compensating amusements. Students would notify the press of a scheduled demonstration, but if the television cameras failed to appear, the protest was promptly canceled. The ferocity of demonstrations was in direct proportion to the number and importance of the news outlets present. CBS News was a great prize, the
New York Times
slightly less valued, and interest in the
New Haven Register
was negligible. Once when the press failed to show up, the law students posted a notice reserving their right to disrupt at a later time, thus nicely combining the fervor of revolutionaries with the caution of legal draftsmen.