Essay: THE NEW RADICALS

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Some Call It Rape

The liberals return the compliment. As Critic Irving Howe puts it, the New Leftists show "an unconsidered enmity toward something vaguely called the Establishment, an equally unreflective belief in the 'decline of the West,' a crude, unqualified anti-Americanism, drawn from every source."

The New Leftists often act as if they had no memory and had read no history; they seem unaware of the Communist-organized rebellions in Greece and Malaya, the invasion of South Korea, the repression of the Hungarian uprising, the Berlin Wall. While they are theoretically opposed to any dictatorship they endlessly make allowances for Communist regimes; they feel outraged by U.S. leaders while either apologizing for or extolling Castro and Mao, and of course they want instant, unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam, heedless of the consequences. "We refuse to be anti-Communist," declared Lynd and Hayden in a statement written for Studies on the Left, since the term is used "to justify a foreign policy that is no more sophisticated than rape."

The recurrent theme is that there must be purity at home first, that the U.S. must heal its own sick society before it can presume to treat others. What, then, do the New Leftists prescribe for the U.S.? They know what they do not want, but not necessarily what they want. Typical is a statement by Clark Kissinger, 26, a former S.D.S. national secretary who ran for alderman in Chicago (and won 864 votes out of 18,-970): "You can imagine the system as a table. Lyndon Johnson sits at the head of the table, labor has a place at the table, industry has a place, the building industry, the .grape growers, the State Street merchants—they all have places. Right now, the poor don't sit at the table; they get some crumbs thrown down to them. Well, we don't want a place at the table. We want to turn it upside down."

When asked what they would do once the table is overturned, the New Radicals mostly reply that this does not concern them. They have no program, and they do not want one. The immediate problem is to discredit and destroy the old society. Let others worry about the details of rebuilding later. But, when pressed, many of the New Left members do state their expectations. These ideas are not systematized and come from many different spokesmen; still, something like a New Left vision of the future emerges.

Yearning for the Past

The vision is Utopian and full of inner contradictions. In a general way, the New Radicals would nationalize basic industry, although some would only tax it more heavily. "The rich" would also be taxed to the point of doing away with big private fortunes. "We must abolish the competitive ethic," says S.D.S. President Nick Egleson. "Do we want to make 8,000,000 cars a year if we are ruining the lives of the people who are making them?" But, while New Leftists loathe capitalism, they assume that the miraculous U.S. economy will go right on turning out wealth no matter what is done to it. Everyone, in the phrase of a New Leftist, will "have money or credit, whether he is able to work or not." Everyone will be guaranteed medical care and education; some suggest 24-hour schools, for children by day, for the parents by night.