Essay: THE NEW RADICALS

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ONLY five or six years ago, to call someone a radical in America seemed quaint and was largely meaningless. Most of the radical proposals of a generation before had become Government policy, and even Communism seemed to have turned relatively conservative. Today, thanks to that amorphous band known as the New Radicals, the word has at least some measure of fresh meaning.

The Old Left had a program for the future; the New Left's program is mostly a cry of rage. The Old Left organized and proselyted, playing its part in bringing about the American welfare state. But it is precisely big government, the benevolent Big Brother, that the New Left is rebelling against. Says Author Paul Jacobs, an Old Leftist himself: "We were rejecting a depression; they're rejecting affluence."

The New Radicals have no power base. Their number, while indeterminate, is obviously small. Still, they are a presence and a voice—partly because of the sheer energy of their commitment, which demands not just parlor protest but physical inconvenience as expressed in the sit-in, the demonstration, the march. They speak for the beleaguered individual in an impersonal society—whether Negro sharecropper, white welfare recipient, or campus dropout. Above all, they speak, or shout, against the Viet Nam war. Says Sociologist Daniel Bell: "At best, the New Left is all heart. At worst, it is no mind." They changed the temper, the tone and to some extent the terms of political debate. The question is what function or future they have beyond that.

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Who are they? Given their almost anarchist horror of formal organization, they are difficult to identify. They are mostly young, bright, from well-to-do, often liberal families. They are creatures of conscience, the children of men of conscience, and they regard their patrimony as a reproach. The largest and most permanent of the shifting New Left groups is the Students for a Democratic Society (some 30,000 members by rough count), whose president changes every year, and whose members once even considered abolishing the office. Originally part of the left-wing but anti-Communist League for Industrial Democracy, the S.D.S. soon began to strike out on its own. In 1962, at a meeting at Port Huron, Mich., 43 representatives of more than a dozen universities and colleges adopted a lengthy manifesto attacking the quality of American life and the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Besides S.D.S., the New Left includes other small groups, largely consisting of individuals with a surrounding cluster of followers. There is, of course, Mario Savio, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, but his stature has faded along with the issue. The more stable heroes in the New Left's pantheon are Staughton Lynd, 38, a pacifist and professor of American history at Yale between speaking engagements, and Tom Hayden, 27, an S.D.S. founder who now heads the independent Newark Community Union Project, a small but energetic program to help the poor. Both attracted a lot of attention a year ago when they went on a self-appointed peace mission to Hanoi. While the New Left scorns conventional politics, it has set up an ambitiously titled National Conference for New Politics, which has backed candidates in local elections, and helped win a seat in the Georgia legislature for Julian Bond, a founder of S.N.C.C.