New Left: Old America

Author(s): James Gilbert

Source: Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60's without Apology (Spring - Summer, 1984), pp. 244247
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466551
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2441

JAMES GILBERT

have gone through college in those same late 60s, out there on the cutting
edge; and a good twenty-five of them were reading Solzhenitsyn, the
book's silver cover kept flashing in my eyes; and at last I knew Charles
Reich was wrong, the New Age was not on the way. More and other epiphanies would soon follow-not least from a trip on a U.S. Navy destroyer
to Southeast Asia at the real end of the war, a voyage which pushed me into
an explicitly radical politics at last. Yet even today I have to admit that radi-

calism exists as a kind of alternating current generated in the arc between

an ongoing affiliation with the "hip-wazee" and all its goofball fears and
dreams on the one hand, on the other that same relentless suffering anger
of all those still left unrepresented, both back home and around the world,
all those whose only freedom lies still all too often in their own refusal to
read. Such a circuit, whose positive and negative poles are constantly reversed, is my chief inheritance from the 60s' reading of me.

New left: old america

JAMES GILBERT

When I began to write about the 1960s as a historical period, I realized I had
to face up to an unpleasantness; not just of sensing the tragedy and violence

that hung over the decade like a wisp of tear gas, but of recognizing that I
had seen it somewhere before. I do not mean that I had lived it before-it

is, after all,inevitable that we believe in the uniqueness of our own share of

history -but as a historian I recognized some surprising shapes. From t

perspective of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 60s had a famili

silhouette, much like the 1830s and 1840s when a similar social and polit
malaise gripped the United States. Such a thought was about as welcome
me as the election of Richard Nixon; something I knew couldn't happ
until it did, at which time I realized why it happened, why it had to happen
I have been troubled by dj?i vu ever since.
I suppose that what distressed me most was the impossibility of b
lieving as I once had in international solidarity in quite the terms that mad
this an exhilarating concept. Before the excesses of the Cultural Revolut
in China, during the days of 1968 in France when friends of mine spoke fo
hours (collect) to the students camped inside the Sorbonne in Paris, the
rising of youth had appeared to be a revolution of interchangeable par
Proponents as well as opponents agreed to that. Sometimes I had been

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NEW LEFT: OLD AMERICA 0 245

jarred by incongruity, as when an international student convention at Columbia I was attending marched off to gather up the New York working
class to picket the Mexican Embassy in support of a strike in that nation
Still, I rarely suspected that the faces of new international heroes that went

up and down on the walls of student housing and apartments might really
represent very different forces than I hoped they did. My assumption wa
grounded in the belief that finally we had stepped outside history and be
yond the clutches of American culture. It is easy to see now that these faces

of international radicals did have at least one common element: they had
been transformed and homogenized by our own faith in them. Just as th
rebellion of youth in the 1960s was truly international in one sense, in part,

it was an American export. Some of the glimmer of revolutionary fervor

was, thus, reflected light.

When I tried to look seriously and dispassionately through the bifocal

lens of history, with a close and a distant perspective, I realized that my
own vision, while living through the decade, required correction. Two con
clusions now seem certain. The period had important echoes in American
history-imagine, if you will, the present echoing back into the past. Speci
fically these echoes were associated with the great age of "Perfectionism,"
in the 1830s and 1840s, when communal experiments, sexual utopianism
political radicalism, feminism, conservative evangelical religion, and aboli
tionism swayed American history onto a course that led straight to the Civil
War. This period had its "burned-over" districts of rapid-fire religious reviv-

als just as our age has had its "burned-out" followers of one political or
moral cause after another. The point is that the seeming particular, peculiar,

unique blend of 1960s radical politics and liberated life styles turns out no
to be peculiar and unique at all, for its antecedents lie well established in
similar uprising of young Americans in the early Victorian Age. The second

point is that whatever the international ties of our age, however much w
might try to abandon the notion of a cultural "city on the hill," we canno
do so. New left, perhaps; but old America.
Looking back, what intrigues me now about the 1960s is my effort,
and that of many friends, to steer clear of other movements that might have
compromised our own aims. This meant either denying that contemporary
music, drug culture, revival religion or sexual liberation had much to do
with the tasks of radical politics. Or it meant that everything called the
"youth movement" would eventually cast off its frivolous apparel and don
a political uniform. I was often angriest when I heard the opposite advice
(for I half believed it) that the new left was associated, cross-ways, with
American culture, with generational politics, a new religious spiritualism
drug culture, and a hundred other manifestations I disliked.
Like anyone engaged in politics, I saw America in political terms, and
struggled to prevent the impulse of dissent from chasing into the blind al
leys of cultural change. That is why I so much disliked Charles Reich's

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246 @ JAMES GILBERT

Greening of America. Not because it was right (it wasn't, in fact his major
premise was almost 180 degrees wrong); but because his book symbolized a
terrible failure of politics. By 1969, when the book appeared, the political
phase of the new left had turned to descent and destruction. For better or
worse - and it turned out worse - the emphasis had to be on cultural
change and a new consciousness. Reich, despite his squishy optimism, was
right in predicting that radical cultural ideas were about to be incorporated
into the mainstream of American culture, like so many eggs being folded
into a batter.

Looking back from the perspective of today, we must try to understand the political perfectionism and activist moralism that characterized all
of the dissenting movements of the 1960s, both left and right. This peculiar-

ly American uprising had happened before, in the face of the profound

moral crisis of slavery. It happened again in the late 1950s and 1960s with
the crisis of segregation, overlaid, compounded and complicated by the
war in Vietnam and pushed by the Cold War and the threat of the bomb.
Under the circumstances, and given our heritage to flee into some sort of
desperate communitarianism, it is amazing that drop-outs remained a minority, not a majority.

That common element, which allowed the free interchange of members between a wide variety of political and cultural movements with
scarcely a scuff of conscience, was a common element of moral perfectionism that they all shared. This has as much to do with the traditions of a Protestant culture as it does with the particular events of the day. The impulse
to expect and demand perfection in politics and society, to live by absolutes

alone, is an old tradition that wends it way in American history, through

Puritanism, Perfectionism, Teetotalism, Prohibition, and a thousand other

reforms and schemes. What we did not recognize at the time was the
hidden Americanism of our demands: the spiritual slogans about equality;
the abhorrence of privilege and elitism; the burning intensity of our rejec-

tion of the old-meaning compromised-left. In fact, nothing could have

been more traditional or more in character.

I suppose the low point of my spirits when it came to this question

occurred about 1963, during a Vietnam vigil (a term that always made m
uncomfortable). It was a very cold February night and a small group of u
gathered in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus. Staughto
Lynd addressed the small band, beginning: "Tonight, we are like the Abol

tioniststhese
bf old
... ."in
I don't
remember
said,although
but my no
an
etched
words
my memory.
Of anything
course, heelse
washe
right,
exactly in his intended sense of paying homage to a respected tradition. In a
curious and direct way he had raised a central dilemma of the day, acknowl-

edging our existence inside a culture that could only equate change wit
moral revolution. We supposed in demanding a pure politics, that we wer

safely out of the path of moral storms and harbored away from the intellec-

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BETWEEN THE 30s AND THE 60s

247

tual compromises of American religion. But purity-not politics-was the

true badge of our protest-and we protested too much.
Looking back to the 1960s now, I think it is important to see with all
the good and bad of that decade, the fundamental ambiguity of our moralistic culture when it is put to the task of political change. There were some
very positive elements to this. For one, Martin Luther King recognized and
exploited the power and contradictions of American secular religiosity with
great skill. The new left and the student movement showed a blinding light

on the war in Vietnam and destroyed the political power of one President

and the mental stability of another. But the new left could never master its

own intensity and spiritualism, could never keep on a political track. Anymore, I believe, than the new right today will be able to withstand the
temptations of moralism.
Thinking back on the 1960s, I see this period as one of enormous energy and change, of a movement in civil rights that altered American history

as much as anything ever has done. But I also see it as a profoundly antipolitical decade, nothing, in its premises or effects like the 1930s during the

heyday of the old left. And, I am forced to wonder what might have happened-what still might happen--if the moral energy of the 1960s were
ever joined to the political shrewdness of the 1930s.

Between the 30s

and the 60s

MURRAY BOOKCHIN
I strongly doubt if we will ever understand- and fully evaluate -the 60s
without placing it against the background of another radical decade, the
30s. Having lived out both periods up to the hilt, I find that my older
contemporaries as well as the younger people with whom I worked twenty
years ago have seldom been able to distance themselves sufficiently from
their time to draw these crucial comparisons adequately. Recent biographies by old New York socialists and communists who lived with such nostalgic exhilaration in the era climaxed by the Spanish Civil War and CIO
organizing drives seem utterly estranged and uncomprehending in their atti-

tudes toward the "new left" and counterculture. By the same token, the
younger people of '68 and of New York's Lower Eastside and San Francis-

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