The Ever Changing Left

TRIGGER WARNINGS:  In which we look at how the left has evolved and students have regressed.

For John, BLUF:  And they haven't gotten better.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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THE OLD NEW LEFT AND THE NEW NEW LEFT

From The Claremont Review of Books, by Editor Charles R. Kesler, from 31 July 2017.

This is going to be one of those longer, Jim Peters like, Posts.

This is about how the left of the late 1950s and the 1960s thought and how the left today thinks and the differences in understanding America and understanding who they are and who we all are.

Since we are jumping in in the middle of the essay, we have to explain who the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society are and their 1962 Manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, drafted by SDS Field Secretary, the late Tom Hayden (later the husband of Ms Jane Fonda).  Click the Links.

Some review:

Yet there was something ingenuous and almost admirable about the SDS’s early manifesto that is lacking in post-Obama radicalism.  Tom Hayden had spent fall 1961 as a Freedom Rider, getting beaten up by the KKK in Mississippi and jailed in Georgia.  He and his comrades were appalled by the racial bigotry of the American South (and North), and they revered, at least in the beginning, the non-violent civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.  They longed, in a way, to emulate the heroes of that movement, who like Martin Luther King drew explicitly from Christian sources, among others, and insisted on strenuous “self-purification” as an essential stage of non-violent consciousness.  Indeed, the Port Huron Statement quoted the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln, even as the civil rights leaders did, accusing the country of not living up to its own principles.  It assailed American hypocrisy, and the apathy and alienation that went with it.

No such Americanism, however vestigial, remains in today’s campus protestors, who celebrate only victims, not martyrs, and who have been taught to believe that America, and the West as a whole, are oppressors and nothing but oppressors, six ways from Sunday—racists, sexists, imperialists, homophobes, xenophobes, transphobes, etc.

There you are.  When Candidate Hillary Clinton said "Deplorables" she was talking the language of the New Left.  We are Les Deplorables and probably irredeemable.

Then there is this contrast with today:

The old New Left hated being treated as children by professors and deans who claimed to stand in loco parentis.  Nothing offended Tom Hayden more, as he remarked in his 1961 Letter, than American universities’ “endless repressions of free speech and thought, the stifling paternalism that infects the student’s whole perception of what is real and possible and enforces a parent-child relationship until the youth is suddenly transplanted into ‘the world.’”  When the Free Speech Movement (FSM) formed at Berkeley in 1964, its analysis of frustrated, alienated students, as Allen J. Matusow writes in his very fine The Unraveling of America:  A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984), “came straight out of the Port Huron Statement.”  “In our free-speech fight,” said one of FSM’s leaders, Mario Savio, “we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.”

Well, that trend reversed, sharply.  The question, for me, is what is the intellectual basis for the views of the modern leftist students?  Below is the background for the 1960s New Left.

It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but the theory embraced by today’s campus Left is far different from that of the ’60s New Left.  The Port Huron Statement reflected deep intellectual engagement, if not exactly seriousness.  Its contemporary influences included Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956).  Marcuse, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, had perhaps the primary philosophical influence on the movement, and along with other writers helped to connect it, however tendentiously, to Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau.

Ah, Herbert Marcuse.  He supposedly said, at one point, "Tear down the Weimar Republic.  Whatever replaces has to be better."  The problem is, Professor Marcuse was working to tear down the Weimar Republic.  And he was wrong about what replaced it being better.  It was replaced by the Third Reich, via the Enabling Act of 1933.

The next excerpt asks if the question is "equal rights" or "equal results".  There is a difference.

It is all quite dreary.  Consider the “basic tenets” of the position.  First, in America (and the theory seems to be purpose-built for this country) racism is pervasive, inescapable, “ordinary” and “not aberrational,” the “common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.”  Only “most”? That equivocation is one of the many slips in this slipshod argument.  But it pales beside the refusal to define “racism.”  Does discriminating against people on the basis of race mean denying them equal rights, or objecting to the imposition of equal results?  The second principle is “material determinism” or “interest convergence,” meaning that whites (but not other races?) are guaranteed to pursue their own economic interests as a race, thus ensuring and perpetuating “white supremacy.”  Third, the “social construction” thesis, which holds that race and races are not “objective, inherent, or fixed” and correspond to no “biological or genetic reality,” but are social inventions.  But how can there be “material determinism” if races are immaterial?

Tolerance, once a goal, became, by the mid-1960s, a bad thing. 

Liberals were the enemy, but in a more urgent and comprehensive way than in the Statement.  Marcuse’s influence was growing among the radicals, and his essay “Repressive Tolerance,” published in ’65, pointed them away from their old free speech idealism and towards a more ruthless, revolutionary consciousness.  Toleration was once a great progressive cause, he argued, when liberals adopted it as a weapon against authoritarian societies.  But now it risked becoming silently repressive:  toleration in a liberal society like America was a means of neutralizing and coopting all opposition to the power structure or power elite.  It was a means of preventing a liberal society from being replaced by a revolutionary one.  Marcuse urged the students to treat tolerance as a partisan tool, i.e., to show no tolerance for “affluence,” corporate capitalism, and the war.  His argument laid the groundwork for political correctness.

So, the last extract talks about how the New Left, went violent in the late 1960s.  People like now Professor Bill Ayers.  It probably doesn't impact most of us, but I actually had met one of the men killed by the Weathermen, at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.  A real human being, and an intellectually smart one, a Post-Doc, with a wife and kids.  Dead due to a deliberate act of some Weathermen.

As the New Left came more and more to resemble the old, cheering Marx and Mao, it turned its back on the Port Huron Statement’s hope for “participatory democracy” and adopted Lenin’s principle of democratic centralism, concentrating control at the top, finally in 1969 in the so-called “Weatherman” faction.  The Weatherman’s call for “Days of Rage” in Chicago, designed ultimately to stop the imperialists’ war by starting a civil war at home, failed miserably.  Afterwards, keen to sow terror, the Weathermen went underground to plant bombs, which later blew up several of their own. From Summer of Love to Days of Rage had taken a little more than two years.

The scary part is that the New New Left seems to have not learned anything.  In violent protests they could polarize the nation and bring it down.  The thing is, one may be against the Klan and Fascism, but still be against a more Stalinist approach.  The question is, where is the acceptable middle in all of this?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff