Irving Howe 1970
Source: Saturday Review, 30 May 1970. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
The following essay, the introduction to my book Beyond the New Left, to be published later this spring by the McCall Publishing Company, was written before the recent events in Cambodia and at Kent State. I find it encouraging that in the tremendous student upsurge of protest there has been thus far mainly a stress on the need for democratic and non-violent political change. The hope for this country is to find a politics combining radical measures with liberal values, and if the students stick by something like that combination they can do enormous good.
What is the New Left? The phrase has become part of our journalistic currency, but the phenomena to which it points are barely a decade old and remain strikingly diverse in character, scattered in organisation, and sometimes incoherent in statement. In any traditional sense, the New Left does not comprise a structured political movement. Whenever it has tried to form a national organisation, as at the disastrous Conference for a New Politics held in Chicago during the summer of 1967, it has quickly fractured into several hostile groups. Students for a Democratic Society, the major New Left group, has recently split into three or four embattled factions, with the two main ones using physical violence on one another, as if intent upon re-enacting the worst of Stalinism. As Mark Rudd, leader of the SDS Weatherman faction, was quoted in The New York Times of 26 September 1969: ‘We sometimes beat them up [the other faction] and they beat us up. What we usually do is beat them up when we find them.’
The New Left has become an important force, but only in certain limited segments of American society. It has made no impact on such major institutions as the trade unions, or on such major social groups as the working class - by traditional Marxist expectations, the lever of revolution. It has not been able to establish itself as a significant presence in either national or regional politics (for example, the pitiably small vote received by Eldridge Cleaver and Dick Gregory in the 1968 Presidential election; the failure of New Leftists to win even a primary in a stronghold like Berkeley). But the New Left has had a notable effect on campus life; it has exerted an oblique but measurable influence on the more extreme black militants; and it has contributed to the growth of a distinctive ‘youth culture’.
Some questions about New Left influence are hard to answer. The claim is often made that it has played a major role in mobilising public sentiment, even if through confrontationist shock tactics, against the Vietnam War. My own judgement is that large sections of both the American population and our political leadership turned to opposing the war mainly out of a realisation that it could not be won short of an intolerable escalation. Nevertheless, it seems likely that on this score, despite some exaggeration, the New Left deserves credit. It did play a valuable role in stirring dissent against the war; it did serve as a pressure on the conscience of liberals. Yet, the paradox that must be noted here is that such credit is of a kind that the New Left cannot, in ideological consistency, be very enthusiastic about. For a central New Left dogma has insisted that ‘the system can’t be changed’, and that to achieve even limited ends it is necessary to complete a wholesale social transformation, what is these days very loosely called ‘a revolution’.
Insofar as the New Left claims credit for mobilising popular sentiment on behalf of changing US policy in Vietnam - and I think it has some right to make that claim - it undercuts its own ‘revolutionary’ theories and tacitly acknowledges that, despite its intentions and rhetoric, it has played the role of a reformist pressure group mobilising sentiment for change within this society. I see nothing dishonourable in playing such a role; I wish only to point to the problems it presents the New Left. And let me also stress that it is not I nor people of my persuasion who insist that achieving short-range goals within the present society is incompatible with working towards long-range social change.
If, however, we do try to estimate the immediate consequences of New Left activities, we must also look at the other side of the balance. We must ask ourselves: How much sentiment has it helped to mobilise for the far Right? To what extent has it contributed to the victories of Nixon in the country as a whole, Reagan in California, and Stenvig in Minneapolis? Now, there is no completely accurate or ‘scientific’ way of measuring the consequences of any political conduct, not even conduct as abrasive as that of the New Left; but every available source of evidence - from opinion polls to electoral results to the use of common sense - indicates that among large segments of the middle and working classes there has set in a strong, and sometimes violent, reaction against New Left methods. My impression is that the more candid New Left spokesmen would not deny this, for, believing as they do in ‘polarisation’ (that is, in provoking large numbers of people towards the extremes of the political spectrum, thereby dislodging and disabling the liberal centre), some of them would actually see the growth of the far Right as a tribute to their own effectiveness. And so it is, although hardly in the way they suppose. For what the New Left, in its thoughtless fascination with apocalypse, fails to consider is the probable line-up of forces in this country if there is to be a polarisation during the next few years - to say nothing of the probable victor in such a showdown.
Other questions concerning its influence are equally hard to answer. To what extent, for instance, was the recent appearance of that promising political tendency we call the New Politics - the Leftist-liberal coalition associated with the campaigns of Senator Eugene McCarthy and the late Senator Robert Kennedy - a consequence of pressures from the New Left? There can’t be an assured reply, but I for one would be prepared to say that yes, some of the credit should go to the New Left. Saying that, however, I would also want to note that most New Left segments, and especially SDS, sneered at and refused to support Senator McCarthy’s candidacy when he rallied public sentiment against the war. One New Left spokesman, Tom Hayden, was even reported to have declared that ‘a vote for George Wallace would further his objective more than a vote for RFK’ (Village Voice, 30 May 1968).
So far, the New Left has made few serious contributions to political thought or cultural experience. Whatever interest the New Left shows in political theory is usually directed towards the work of older writers whose work it appropriates and sometimes twists for its own ends. But the New Left has had a considerable impact on intellectual styles and fashions, reviving radical sentiments in elderly men of letters who found it expedient to restrain themselves during the conservative Fifties, providing a rhetoric of excitement for young writers often well attuned to the demands of the market, and helping to make ‘radicalism’ a hot journalistic property in magazines as various as Esquire and The New York Review of Books.
In its few years of existence the New Left has already gone through two distinct phases. The first was a phase of populist fraternity, stressing an idealistic desire to make real the egalitarian claims of the American tradition, a non- and even anti-ideological approach to politics, and a strategy of going into local communities in order to organise oppressed minorities. Perhaps the major stimulant to this early New Left was the upsurge of the American Negroes in the early 1960s, when they began to struggle for their dignity as men and their rights as citizens. And perhaps the most dramatic action of the early New Left was the journey hundreds of young people took in the summer of 1963 to live and work in Mississippi, helping Negroes organise themselves for local community and political ends. The main slogan of that moment - appealing but vague - was ‘participatory democracy’. From the viewpoint of those of us committed to the politics of democratic socialism, this first phase of the New Left was, despite occasional tactical blunders, a profoundly welcome and promising reinvigoration of American political life.
The second phase of the New Left signifies a sharp turn: away from fraternal sentiment and back to ill-absorbed dogma, away from the shapelessness of participatory democracy and back to the rigidity of vanguard élites, away from the loving spirit of non-violence and back to a quasi-Leninist fascination with violence. In this second phase, the New Left grows in numbers yet makes certain, through its sterile authoritarianism, that it will not be more than a blown-up reincarnation of the radical sects of the past.
What are the causes of this sharp change? The breakup of the Negro-labour-liberal coalition that had sparked the civil rights movement and ensured the victory of John F Kennedy; the despair, much of it warranted and authentic, over US involvement in Vietnam; the rise of separatist and nationalist sentiment among black youth; an intense disillusionment not only with liberal politics of the moment but with the whole idea of liberalism; and the growing appeal of the ‘Third World Revolution’ conceived (or misperceived) by the New Left as an odd blend of romantic anarchism and Leninist toughness. In this second phase of the New Left, it sometimes seemed as if the SDS were transforming itself into a society for the resurrection of the god that failed. Notions, dogmas, ideologies and slogans that an earlier generation of radicals had discarded after painful reflection and experience now came back in crude form. The theory of ‘social fascism’, Stalin’s contribution to the victory of Hitlerism, was transformed into a theory of ‘liberal fascism’ by SDS leaders. The idea of a self-appointed ‘vanguard’ that will prod the sluggish masses into rebellion - one of the more dubious contributions of Leninist orthodoxy - was uncritically embraced by middle-class students whose view of the actual conditions, sentiments and needs of ‘the masses’ was utterly lacking in reality. The notion that ‘bourgeois democracy’ is no more than a mask for the domination of capital and therefore not to be valued by radicals found strong echoes in the Sixties. And perhaps most distressing of all, the liberal values of tolerance and respect for the rights of opponents were sneeringly dismissed in accordance with the arid formulas of Herbert Marcuse. To be sure, not all New Leftists succumbed to this authoritarian debauch. Some, like Greg Calvert, former SDS National Secretary, complained sadly about the ‘Stalinisation of the New Left’, and looked back wistfully to its earlier years; but in the main, the drift was towards the sectarian wastelands.
It would now seem that we are on the verge of still another phase in the development of the New Left. Some elements within it - the Weathermen and the Crazies, for example - seem to be abandoning what they have regarded as orthodox Leninism and to be turning to a mixture of violent adventurism, staged desperation and even hooliganism, all marked by serious symptoms of social pathology. Any contrast between the United States today and Russia in the late nineteenth century must of course be made with a maximum of caution, yet it is hard to avoid the impression that the desperado-totalitarian Left comes to us as a re-enactment of the politics of the fanatical Russian terrorist Serge Nechayev. The Weathermen, having given up hope for the proletariat, now see the main revolutionary force in our society as the high school students; their experience may yet lead them to the kindergartens.
How far some elements - not, it should be said in fairness, the majority - of the New Left have sunk into the pathology of violence can be seen from the following report about a recent Weathermen gathering that appeared in the 10 January 1970 issue of The Guardian, a New Left weekly. The report summarises the keynote speech of Bernardine Dohrn, former inter-organisation secretary of SDS:
Dohrn characterised violent, militant response in the streets as ‘armed struggle’ against imperialism... ‘We're about being a fighting force alongside the blacks, but a lot of us are still honkies, and we're still scared of fighting. We have to get into armed struggle.’
Part of armed struggle, as Dohrn and others laid it down, is terrorism. Political assassination - openly joked about by some Weathermen - and literally any kind of violence that is considered anti-social were put forward as legitimate forms of armed struggle...
A twenty-foot-long poster adorned a wall of the ballroom. It was covered with drawings of bullets, each with a name. Along with the understandable targets like Chicago’s Mayor Daley, the Weathermen deemed as legitimate enemies to be offed, among others, The Guardian (which has criticised Weathermen) and Sharon Tate, one of several victims in the recent mass murder in California. She was eight months pregnant.
‘Honkies are going to be afraid of us’, Dohrn insisted. She went on to tell the war council about Charlie Manson, accused leader of the gang which allegedly murdered the movie star and several others on their Beverly Hills estate. Manson has been portrayed in the media as a Satanic, magnetic personality who held near-hypnotic sway over several women whom he lent out to friends as favours and brought along for the murder scene. The press also mentioned Manson’s supposed fear of blacks - he reportedly moved into rural California to escape the violence of a race war.
Weatherman, the ‘Bureau’ says, digs Manson...
‘Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!’, said Bernardine Dohrn.
It will be said that these sentiments are in no way characteristic of the thousands of young people who have been protesting against the Vietnam War. I entirely agree. It will be said that the Weatherman group isn’t representative of the New Left. In one sense, that also is true. No other New Left tendency has abandoned itself so completely to corrupting fantasies of blood. But it needs to be said that Miss Dohrn’s ravings have a connection - distorted, extreme, yet with the representativeness of caricature - to things one can hear these days among some portions of the New Left. The cult of violence, the identification of a tiny group of affluent youth with the ‘destiny of the revolution’, the adulation of charismatic authoritarian leaders, the crude hatred for liberal values - all these can be found in various New Left tendencies, even if without the vivid pathology of the Weathermen.
The most interesting theoretical question concerning the rapid changes within the New Left has to do with the relation between its earlier and later phases. Those of us who write for such journals as Dissent, whatever our shortcomings, can at least claim some credit for having foreseen the possibility that a politics of populist vagueness would lead to a politics of authoritarian rigidity. For this decline I would suggest two causes.
1: The crisis and virtual collapse of US liberalism. During the 1960s, with the possible exception of John F Kennedy’s brief tenure as President and Eugene McCarthy’s effort to win the Democratic nomination, American liberalism was in a bad way. Without pretending to a full explanation, let me at least indicate a few summary reasons for this decline: the exhaustion of traditional New Deal politics, alliances and outlooks; the appearance of moral-political issues that bread-and-butter liberalism was not equipped to deal with; the involvement of certain liberal leaders (for example, Humphrey) in a war that large numbers of young people rightly saw as indefensible.
A rough but useful axiom can be suggested about recent American politics: the New Left has flourished as a result of, or in direct proportion to, the failures and failings of liberalism. When the candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy seemed to offer a significant alternative, a way of realising the hopes of the idealistic young through electoral politics, thousands of young radicals and liberals flocked to their campaigns. Both on and off the campus, the New Left then began to wither into a marginal group, limited for the time to nasty and impotent sniping. But when there seemed no viable alternative, and both candidates in the 1968 Presidential election spoke as supporters of the Vietnam War, moods of despair swept across the campus, and the New Left could transform these moods into a disillusionment with liberal politics in particular and the idea of liberalism in general.
2: An internal connection between the thought of the early New Left and the thought of the later New Left. What both shared was an impatience, sometimes a distrust, and more recently a downright contempt for the methods and norms of democracy - the ‘cumbersomeness’ or ‘sham’ of representative elections, the ‘irrelevance’ of undemonstrative majorities, the ‘manipulation’ of the masses by politicians and the media, the ‘dullness’ of ordinary middle-class people, etc. Under the guidance of such authoritarian thinkers as Marcuse, the New Left in both its phases, although more so in the later one, revealed a profoundly élitist bias. It might speak about ‘the people’, and sometimes even ‘the workers’, but it found its base of support mainly among the alienated middle-class young.
When the phrase ‘participatory democracy’ first began to be heard, it gained its impact as a response to a genuine problem that had been troubling both socialist and non-socialist thinkers for some time: what could be done to stop the gradual erosion of democratic institutions, in which the formal appearance of participation by the people continued but the real substance declined?
At first, the New Left’s emphasis on participatory democracy signified mainly a desire to reinvigorate democracy, to give it greater meaning and immediacy - although the New Left rarely had any concrete proposals for achieving this end. Too often participatory democracy meant in practice a blithe dismissal of parliamentary rules in the discussions of the New Left groups, a practice that may have encouraged collective expressiveness (and interminable meetings) but also proved to be peculiarly open to manipulation by tight little factions and charismatic figures emphasising their own modesty. At best, such procedures helped enliven - were relevant to - the politics of small groups; but they could contribute almost nothing to solving the problem of democratic politics in large societies, where the sheer number of citizens and the complexity of competing interests require a system of representative institutions.
The stress on participatory democracy proved to be especially damaging in the curious way it prepared the ground for authoritarian politics. There was not too great a distance between the distrust shown for the limitations of representative institutions by the early New Left and the contempt shown for the very idea of representative institutions by the later New Left. To dismiss ‘formal democracy’ on behalf of participatory democracy was in effect to jettison the values of both - as if, in reality, democratic rights didn’t always require a commitment to ‘forms’, that is, rules both fixed and open to change through agreed-upon procedures. By the late Sixties, one rarely heard much about participatory democracy from the New Left. Now the fashionable phrase was ‘revolution’, unspecified as to social character, political possibility or ultimate goal, and too often reduced to a ritual of expressiveness that required neither thought nor moral justification.
Those of us who want to preserve and extend democracy, while simultaneously working towards fundamental social change, must acknowledge that the coming decade is likely to be a time of trouble, even peril. There are linked dangers from the irrationalities and violence of both polar extremes, which together could destroy our hopes for an American movement at once democratic, militant and radical. The New Left plays a double role here. It contributes valuable energy to the needed task of protest and insurgency, but it also contributes a political-moral confusion, sometimes verging on nihilism, which threatens liberal values and helps provoke a popular backlash.
Nor are our objections merely tactical. The kind of ‘revolution’ envisaged by all the SDS factions has nothing to do with the large-scale social transformation this country needs. Who with a reasonable impulse to self-presentation and democratic survival would care to test out the dispensation of a Tom Hayden or a Mark Rudd? Worthy fellows, perhaps, but better powerless.
The perspective I would advance for the immediate future combines a broad coalition of popular forces to work for immediate social improvements along a liberal course, and a regathering of those people, now a tiny minority in this country, who believe in the values of democratic socialism. This signifies:
* The premise that we are not and will not soon be in a ‘revolutionary situation’.
* The sub-premise that, if ‘revolutionary activity’ in the next few years comes to more than loud talk, it will have an élitist, desperado and adventurist character.
* The belief that it is in our interest to preserve and improve the present agencies of democratic politics, marred as they may be, requiring changes as they do, and even liable to sudden collapse as they are.
I think that the more sensitive and undogmatic elements in and near the New Left will soon have to face the futility of trying to ‘go it alone’. Their movement has grown and probably will continue to grow; yet, barring some major self-transformation, it will also continue to have the character of a sect isolated in fundamental outlook, language and psychology from the American people. Nevertheless, it contains precious resources of energy and idealism, and this energy and idealism ought to be thrust into the mainstream of American politics.
One can only hope for a slow regathering of forces among the liberal-labour-Left in the United States. A movement that fails to understand the needs and aspirations of the American workers and their unions, or that dismisses them contemptuously in the name of some abstract revolutionary purity, is doomed to failure. A movement that fails to understand the urgency of moral protest animating the young and that stays rigidly within the limits of traditional New Deal and post-New Deal liberalism is also doomed to failure.
Can we then bring together the strategy of coalition with the passions of insurgency? Can we recognise that in the American system wide and loose electoral blocs are essential, even if inherently unsatisfactory to ideological purists, while at the same time the idea of stirring the bottom layers of society to speak out for themselves is also urgent? Such a view is inherently complex, and this is a moment when many people are seized by a mania for simplicity; but I think it is a political perspective that, no matter how difficult to realise, is required by the present state of things. Oddly enough, if you were to go back to the founding document of SDS, the now famous Port Huron statement, you would find a view of politics fairly close to what has been said here. One can only hope that many young people will yet return to it.