The festival was held on the UCLA campus and was a capsule demonstration, with a cast of thousands, of why conservatives like Hilton Kramer and Norman Podhoretz harbor the "delusion" that the culture is controlled by the party of the left. As in previous years, the festival headliners were leftists like Alice Walker and Betty Friedan — and even Sister Souljah — who had drawn thousands of their dedicated fans to the event. There was no Tom Clancy, no Tom Wolfe, no Thomas Sowell, and no Robert Bork to draw a similar conservative crowd. Among the hundreds of authors, in fact, I counted only a handful (actually, five) who were conservative, all locals. None was flown in like Walker, Friedan, and Sister Souljah as marquee attractions. As a tribute to his own lack of self-irony, Wasserman had appointed himself chair of a panel called "The Ethics of Book Reviewing."
I amused myself by walking around and bumping into former comrades, who seemed omnipresent. Among them were Nation editor Victor Navasky and /i>Nation writers Todd Gitlin and Bob Scheer. I especially enjoyed the encounter with Scheer, who was in company with Navasky and Gitlin, but who made an end run around the other two in order to avoid having to shake my hand. Later I came upon Christopher Hitchens showing his parents around the event. Christopher greeted me cordially and thanked me for defending him in Salon when he had come under attack from the left. When I told him how Scheer had run away, he smiled. "Yeah, he's not speaking to me."
I had been scheduled for the second of three serial panels on the 1960s, called "Second Thoughts," although in fact I was the only panelist who had had any. The panels were recorded for later showing on C-SPAN and were held in Korn Auditorium on the UCLA campus. When I arrived, the room was packed with five hundred graying and scraggly-faced leftists, many in message T-shirts and Nation baseball hats. I counted thirteen panelists in all for the three 1960s discussions, every last one but myself a loyalist to the discredited radical creed. Hayden and Scheer were on a panel together. Russell Jacoby was there, too.
The other panelists at my event were Maurice Zeitlin and Sara Davidson. A third leftist had failed to show. Davidson was the author of a 1960s memoir of sexual liaisons entitled Loose Change and the chief writer for the politically correct television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Her politics could be gleaned from her latest book, Cowboy, about her affair with a man who was intellectually her inferior and whom she had to support with her ample television earnings, but who gave great sex. The book celebrated this affair as a triumph of feminism.
The panel moderator, Maurice Zeitlin, was a sociologist at UCLA and had written books with titles like American Society, Inc. and Talking Union. Maurice and I had been friends in Berkeley at the beginning of the 1960s, when the two of us, along with Scheer, were part of a radical circle that produced one of the first magazines of the New Left, called Root and Branch. Maurice and Scheer had coauthored one of the first favorable books on Fidel Castro's communist revolution, which I had edited. Although we lived in the same city, I had seen Maurice only once, by accident, in the last thirty-five years.
While waiting for the panel to begin, I thought about the dilemma the whole scenario presented. I owed Wasserman a thank you for being there at all, but at the same time I could not ignore the outrage unfolding before me. A leftist political convention was being held under the auspices of one of the most important press institutions in America, and was being promoted to a national television audience under the pretense that such select and resentful voices somehow represented American culture.
I resolved my dilemma by thanking Steve and the Times editors "for allowing me to crash this party," and then remarked that it was a national disgrace that a major press institution would stage a "symposium" on the 1960s stacked thirteen-to-one in favor of the radicals. Later in the discussion, I pointed out that the UCLA Venue reflected the same unconscionable bias. A politically-controlled hiring process at American universities had resulted over time in the systematic exclusion of conservatives from the liberal arts faculties of UCLA and other prestigious schools. In contrast, even nonacademic leftists were regularly appointed to university faculties by their political cronies. Jacoby was one example. Scheer, who had been made a professor of journalism at usc's Annenberg School by its dean, a former Clinton Administration official, was another.
I focused my speech on the way in which 1960s leftists had betrayed their own ideals by doing an about-face on civil rights and supporting race preferences, by abandoning the Vietnamese when they were being murdered and oppressed by communists, and by helping to crush the island of Cuba under the heel of the Castroist dictatorship. I also described my experiences with the Black Panther Party, a gang led by murderers and rapists whom the left had anointed as its political vanguard and whose crimes leftists continue to ignore to this day. I thought it interesting that a left that had supported international criminals during the Cold War was now supporting criminals like Mumia Abu Jamal and the inhabitants of what one of their leaders, Angela Davis, called the "prison-industrial complex" at home. These crusades against law enforcement, so characteristic of the left, hurt the poorest and most vulnerable citizens of our cities, particularly blacks, who are the chief victims of the predators the left defends. While the ideas and programs of leftists were seductive, their implementation had been an unmitigated human disaster. Which is why I had become a conservative.
As was common in my experience on similar platforms, the debate turned out to be a non-event. Adopting a standard tactic of the left I had encountered in the past, Sara Davidson simply ignored the challenge of my remarks and opened hers by saying that she saw the 1960s "in a wider, bigger context than just the Black Panthers." Then she commented, "My challenge is not to revise the Sixties, to re-analyze and reinterpret it, but to get back in touch with the essence and the spirit of that time." This was the kind of thoughtless arrogance one can expect from people inhabiting a cultural universe which they effectively control and in which, therefore, no challenge can threaten their hegemony or require a serious reply.
Stepping in for the no-show panelist, Maurice gave a speech, which could easily have been made in 1964, about the "silent generation" and American imperialism in Vietnam. He concluded with a flourish about the movement and how it was inspired by the idea of social justice. Maurice's eloquence about this commitment and about Vietnam was not tempered by a single fact that had been revealed since the end of the war: not, for instance, the two-and-a-half million Indo-Chinese slaughtered by the communists after America's forced withdrawal, not the interviews with North Vietnamese leaders that showed how the support of American radicals for the communist cause had helped to prolong the war and make the bloodbath possible. Nor did he bother to explain the silence of the crusaders for social justice during the long night of Vietnam's oppression by its leftist liberators.
As the discussion grew heated during the rejoinder period that followed, the audience got into the act. There was lots of heckling, making it difficult for me to complete a sentence. Shouts of "racist" were audible. A member of the audience rubbed his fingers in the air as though holding a wad of bills, while he and several others accused me of selling out for money. It was a moment familiar to me from almost all my university appearances, when the importance of being a "public intellectual," beyond the control of the tenured left, was made eminently clear. For if I were inside an academic institution and dependent on it for my livelihood, my career would certainly be destroyed if I spoke out as I had.
Name-calling and ad hominem assaults, as I had come to appreciate, were indispensable weapons in the arsenal of the left. Fear of them was what kept people in line. "Over the whole of this worthy enterprise," Hilton Kramer writes of modern "liberalism," "there hovered a great fear-the fear of being thought 'reactionary,' the fear of being relegated to the Right. . . . The very thought of being accused of collaborating with 'reaction,' as it was still called, was a liberal nightmare, and there was no shortage of Stalinist liberals (as I believe they must be called) to bring the charge of 'reaction' . . . at every infraction, o
r suspected infraction, of 'progressive' doctrine." That was why at universities like UCLA, while private professional polls showed faculties to be evenly divided over race preferences, only a handful of professors have dared to publicly voice their opposition.
Maurice was embarrassed by the heckling and, to his credit, spoke in my defense. He recalled how as a young teaching assistant at Princeton at the end of the 1950s his own students had signed a petition to get him fired because of his views on the Vietnam War. He told the UCLA audience that they were engaged in the same type of behavior. Referring to me as "one of the most trenchant critics of the left," he advised them that when they were groaning at my remarks they couldn't hear what I had to say (as though that would bother them!). "It is precisely this," he added, "that David turns into a characterization of The Left, as though there really is such a monolith."
Here Maurice had hit the absolute center of the blind spot that has kept the left innocent of its effects. If there was no left, how could it do any of the things conservatives have accused it of doing? How could it dominate the culture or exclude conservatives even more effectively than McCarthyism had excluded leftists in the past? Obviously, it could not. This assumption (that there really is no left) explains why Jacoby and so many others could think such an idea incomprehensible.
Of course the left is not a monolith. But then it never has been-not even in the days of Lenin and Stalin. Today, the left includes civilized social democrats like Maurice Zeitlin, but also ideological fascists who will shout down a conservative speaker and threaten opponents with verbal terrorism and even physical violence.
Ward Connerly, a trustee of the University of California who has led the fight against racial preferences, has been prevented by leftist gangs from speaking at several major universities. These acts of incivility have been abetted by cowardly administrators who do not share the witch-hunting mentality of the demonstrators, but are unwilling to stand up to them. There is not a conservative faculty member lacking tenure at an American university who does not live in fear of possible termination for politically incorrect views. While Maurice can admirably chastise uncivil passions at a public forum, he nonetheless acquiesces in a political hiring process at his own university that ensures that conservatives will remain virtually invisible. Steve Wasserman may be a nuanced radical whose socializing generously includes political pariahs like myself, but he will still enforce their marginality in the pages of his own magazine, or at festivals he organizes. And Russell Jacoby may be capable of composing book-length critiques of his fellow leftists, but writing in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, he will casually dismiss as a paranoid delusion the view of one of America's leading conservative thinkers that he inhabits a culture that is controlled by hostile forces.
V
LOOKING BACKWARD
18
Telling It Like It Wasn't
THE YEAR I998 was a time for the nostalgia artists of the left to remember their glory days of thirty years before, and the magic of a moment that many of them have never left. It was a time in their imaginations of lost innocence, when impossible dreams were brutally cut off by assassination and repression. For them, it was a time of progressive possibility that has left them stranded on the shores of a conservative landscape ever since.
A summary expression of such utopian regrets is found in Steve Talbot's ras documentary, "1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation." Talbot's narrative is shaped by radicals of the era like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, whom he interviews on camera. The choice of Gitlin and Hayden as authorities on the era is predictable for someone like Talbot, himself the veteran of a movement that promotes itself as an avatar of "participatory democracy" but closes off debate within its own ranks in a way worthy of the Communist regimes it once admired. Thus the auteur of "The Year That Shaped A Generation" excludes from this cinematic paean to his revolutionary youth any dissenters from inside the ranks of those who were there.
I myself am one such veteran who does not share Talbot's enthusiasm for 1968, nor his view of it as a fable of Innocents At Home. One explanation may be that I am ten years older than Talbot, and therefore know firsthand the state of our "innocence" then. Yet Gitlin and Hayden are also pre-boomers. An age gap cannot really explain the different views we have of what took place. Naturally, I would prefer to recall the glory days of my youth in a golden light, just like Gitlin and Hayden. For me, however, the era has been irreparably tarnished by actions and attitudes I vividly remember, but they prefer to forget.
The myth of innocence in Talbot's film, begins with President Lyndon Johnson's announcement in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Talbot was 19 years old and draft-eligible: "We were all like Yossarian in Catch-22," he recalls in an article written for Salon magazine reprising his documentary film. "We took this very personally. 'They' were trying to kill 'us.' But now Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle." The miracle, of course, was the democratic system, which the left had declared war on, but which had responded to the will of the people all the same. In 1968, radicals like us were calling for a "liberation" that would put an end to the system. For us the "system" was the enemy. But contrary to what Hayden, Gitlin, Talbot, and all the rest of us were saying at the time, the system worked. Looking back, we should all have defended it, and worked within it, instead of what we did do, which was to try to tear it down. Gitlin and Hayden have hedgingly (and sotto voce) acknowledged this fact but without judging their past actions accordingly. Talbot does not notice the difference. Nor does he reflect on the contradiction between what he and his comrades advocated then, and what everyone recognizes to be the case now.
The "they" Talbot refers to, and by which he means the government and the social establishment, were assuredly not trying to kill "us" in 1968. (Even in its retrospective voice, the narcissism of the boomer generation is impressive.) The attention of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were actually not on us but on the fate of Indochina. They had committed American forces to prevent the communist conquest of South Vietnam and Cambodia, and the bloodbath that we now know was in store for their inhabitants, should the communists win the war. As a result of the communist victory (and our efforts to make America lose), more people — more poor Indo-Chinese peasants — were killed by the marxist victors in the first three years of the communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the thirteen years of the anti-communist war. This is a fact that has caused some of us veterans of those years to reconsider our commitments and our innocence then. But not Talbot or the other nostalgists he has invited to make his film.
For them, the moral innocence of their comrades and themselves remains intact to this very day. According to them, their innocence was brutally ambushed when forces inherent in the system they hated conspired to murder the agents of their hope: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. And it was only that murder that caused them to become radicals at war with America. The year was 1968. "I experienced King's assassination as the murder of hope," writes Talbot, speaking for them all. In the film, Gitlin, whose history of the 1960s first announced this theme, remembers his similar thoughts at the time: "America tried to redeem itself and now they've killed the man who was taking us to the mountaintop." This is a false memory and there is something extremely distasteful in the fact that it is proposed by a historic participant like Gitlin. For, as Gitlin well knows, in the year 1968 neither he nor Tom Hayden, nor any serious New Left radical, thought of themselves as a liberal reformer or was still a follower of Martin Luther King.
One indicator of the self-conscious dissociation of radicals like Gitlin and Hayden from reformers like King is that neither of them, nor any other white student activist, sos leader, or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis for the demonstrations King was organizing in 1968 at the time he was killed.. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) could still be called a serious supporter of King in the year before he was assassinated. The new black heroes of the New L
eft were prophets of separatism and violence, like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, and the martyred Malcolm X. King had been unceremoniously toppled from the leadership of the civil rights movement two years before. The agendas of the radicals who pushed King aside were "black power" and revolutionary violence, and they had already replaced King's pleas for nonviolence and integration in the imaginations of the left.
Like other New Left leaders, Todd Gitlin was far from the idealistic liberal he impersonates in his book or Talbot's film. And like practically all in the New Left, Gitlin had (by his own admission) stopped voting in national elections as early as 1964 because, as the ses slogan put it, "the revolution is in the streets." To Gitlin and other New Leftists, the two parties were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the corporate ruling class. Activists, who saw themselves as revolutionaries against a "sham" democracy dominated by multinational corporations, were not going to invest hope in a leader like King whose political agenda was integration into the system, and who refused to join their war on the Johnson Administration, its imperialist adventures abroad and "tokenist" liberalism at home.
In Talbot's film, Hayden, too, embraces a doctrine of original innocence, but his disingenuous presentation of self involves fewer flat untruths than Gitlin's. He relies on subtle shadings and manipulations of the truth, a style of deception that became his political signature: "At that point," Hayden says of the King assassination, "I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn't know what would happen. Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I'd be imprisoned or killed."
The reality is that any "middle-class assumptions" held by Hayden — or any prominent ses activists-had already been chucked into the historical dustbin years before. Three out of four of the drafters of the famous 1962 Port Huron Statement were "red diaper babies" or marxists. The fourth was Hayden himself, who by his own account in his autobiography, Reunion, learned his politics in Berkeley in 1960 at the feet of children of the Old Left. (Hayden names Michael Tigar and Richard Flacks, in particular, as his mentors.) By 1965, ses president Carl Oglesby was proclaiming publicly, in a famous speech, that it was time to "name the System" that we all wanted to destroy. The name of the system was "corporate capitalism," and it was analyzed by SDS leaders in pretty much the same terms as in party texts read by the communist cadres in Moscow, Havana, and Hanoi.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 19
