It is commonly said that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared. “Has there ever been such politically barren radicalism as that of the Sixties?” Columnist George Will wrote, “…The Sixties are dead. Not a moment too soon.”17 Would that it were so, but the truth, alas, is otherwise. The New Left did collapse as a political movement because of its internal incoherence and amorphous program, and because its revolutionary rhetoric and proclivity for violence repelled most Americans. There never was any chance that this collection of frantic youths could become or instigate a popular movement. What we see in modern liberalism, however, may be the ultimate triumph of the New Left.
Its adherents did not go away or change their minds; the New Left shattered into a multitude of single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual organizations, multiculturalists, and new or freshly radicalized organizations such as People for the American Way, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Planned Parenthood.
Each of these pursues a piece of the agenda of the cultural and political Left, but they do not announce publicly an overarching program, as the New Left did, that would enable people to see that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical philosophy. Yet these groups are in touch with one another and often come together in a coalition on specific issues. The splintering of the New Left proved to be an advantage because the movement became less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than was the case in the Sixties.
As the rioting and riotousness died down in the early 1970s and seemingly disappeared altogether in the last half of that decade and in the 1980s, it seemed, at last, that the Sixties were over. They were not. It was a malignant decade that, after a fifteen-year remission, returned in the 1980s to metastasize more devastatingly throughout our culture than it had in the Sixties, not with tumult but quietly, in the moral and political assumptions of those who now control and guide our major cultural institutions. The Sixties radicals are still with us, but now they do not paralyze the universities; they run the universities.
If the problem were only the universities and the chattering classes, there might be reason to be more optimistic. The Sixties have gone further than that, however. “The New Lefts anti-institutional outlook and anti-bourgeois value scheme has fed into the ‘new liberalism’ increasingly held by the upper middle class. Indeed, the ‘radical’ values and orientations expressed by SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and SDS workers in the early sixties have become the conventional wisdom of college-educated urban professionals, especially those under thirty-five…. Whatever their other successes and failures, the youthful radicals of that decade propelled a new set of values from the fringes to the very midst of contemporary social conflict.”18 That was written in 1982. It seems even more true today.
Thus, the themes and traits of the New Left have become prominent in today’s culture. As will be seen throughout this book, the Sixties generation’s fixation on equality has permeated our society and its institutions, much to our disadvantage. Their idea of liberty has now become license in language, popular culture, and sexuality.
The idea that everything is ultimately political has taken hold. We know its current form as “political correctness,” a distemper that afflicts the universities in their departments of humanities, social sciences, and law. Works of literature are read for their subtexts, usually existing only in the mind of the politically correct reader, about the oppression of women, Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism. Political correctness is not confined to the enclaves of the academy. It is now to be found in museums, art galleries, seminaries, foundations…all the institutions relating to opinion and attitude formation.
A corollary to the politicization of the culture is the tactic of assaulting ones opponents as not merely wrong but morally evil. That was, of course, a key stratagem of the New Left, and it remains a crucial weapon in modern liberalisms armory. The rioters in the streets did not criticize the universities as in need of reform but as institutions rotten with immorality from top to bottom. Critics of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan were not said to be mistaken but were denounced as greedy pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and insurance companies out to protect their illicit profits.
The student radicals’ habitual lying is easily enough explained. They were antinomians. Just as those Christian heretics thought themselves freed by God’s grace from any obligation to the moral law, so the student radicals, imbued with the political grace of the Left, were freed of the restraints of law and morality. It could not be immoral to lie in a noble cause. For the same reason, it could not be wrong to break laws or heads.
Modern liberals, being in charge of the institutions they once attacked, have no need to break heads and only an occasional need to break laws. They do, however, have a need to lie, and do so abundantly, since many Americans would not like their actual agenda.
One of the New Left’s ambitions was to move the Democratic Party further to the left of the American center, to convert it to a more radical stance from the traditional liberal-labor ideology the party had espoused since Franklin Roosevelt built his coalition. Historian Terry H. Anderson, a rather uncritical admirer of the New Left, claims that the Democrats embraced the ideas expressed in the Port Huron Statement.19 There is much truth in that. Certainly student radicals provided the McGovern cadres that took the party left in 1972. Later, as Capitol Hill staffers and elected congressmen, they moved the congressional Democrats well to the left of most Americans who consider themselves Democrats. The parties are aligning themselves along the lines of the war in the culture. Issues such as abortion, flag burning, special homosexual rights, feminism (including women in combat), quotas and affirmative action, the direction of welfare reform, all of these and more already are or are coming to be issues that divide Congress along party lines. The perception that the Democrats are on the wrong side of some of these issues helps to explain the political successes of the Republicans in recent years.
But the primary effect of the Sixties generation is in the realm of culture, as the following chapters seek to demonstrate. Politics may have little effect on elite culture and hence little impact on what is taught in schools and universities or on the reinstitution of the restraints of religion, morality, and law that once gave us classical liberalism instead of the modern variety.
It is troubling to realize that the Sixties merely gave enormous acceleration to trends that had been in place for some time. It may well be that we would ultimately have arrived where we are if the Sixties had never happened. We might, on the other hand, have recognized the problems at a less virulent stage and have been able to deal with them more effectively if the Sixties had not crashed down upon America and overwhelmed us. For those who dislike what we are becoming, the task is not merely to resist but to attack the many manifestations of corruption and restore something of what we once were. That will not be easy: the formulations of the Sixties are now deeply embedded in our opinion-forming institutions and our culture.
In the end, the spirit of Port Huron triumphed: it did change the world. Whether that change is permanent remains to be seen.
3
“We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident”
THE RAGE FOR LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
For all the decades lurid brutality and revolutionary upheaval, the Sixties were not a complete break with the spirit of the American past. Rather, those years saw an explosive expansion of certain American (and Western) ideals and a corresponding severe diminution of others. That deserves to be stressed because if modern developments are in the American grain, if they grow from our roots, as there is reason to believe they do, they will be much harder to reverse than it is comfortable to think.
Though the Sixties brought American concepts of libe
rty and equality to new extremes, that possibility was always inherent in those ideals. Equality and liberty are, of course, what America said it was about from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is customary to grow misty-eyed about the elegance and profundity of that formulation. It speaks in the vocabulary of natural rights, which many Americans find congenial, though without examining the full implications of that vocabulary.
It was indeed stirring rhetoric, entirely appropriate for the purpose of rallying the colonists and justifying their rebellion to the world. But some caution is in order. The ringing phrases are hardly useful, indeed may be pernicious, if taken, as they commonly are, as a guide to action, governmental or private. Then the words press eventually towards extremes of liberty and the pursuit of happiness that court personal license and social disorder. The necessary qualifications assumed by Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration were not expressed in the document. It would rather have spoiled the effect to have added “up to a point” or “within reason” to Jefferson’s resounding generalities.
The signers of the Declaration took the moral order they had inherited for granted. It never occurred to them that the document’s rhetorical flourishes might be dangerous if that moral order weakened. When they had won their independence and got down to the actual business of governing a nation, the Founders were not so lyrical. The “unalienable Rights” of the Declaration turned out, of course, frequently to be alienable. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, for example, explicitly assumes that a criminal may be punished by depriving him of life or liberty, which certainly tends to interfere with his pursuit of happiness.
The tension between the rhetoric of the Declaration and the practicalities expressed in the Constitution is instructive. The former articulates a confident liberalism, while the latter assumes that there will be restraints on that liberalism. To note this is not to adopt the old canard that the Constitution was the instrument of a conservative reaction against the liberalism of the Declaration. To the contrary, the Constitution and the laws it permitted expressed the constraints on liberty assumed by those who signed and welcomed the spirit of the Declaration. But these assumptions and restraints are passive and proved ineffective to halt the aggressive march of liberalism to its present condition.
Liberalism does not vary; it is always the twin thrusts of liberty and equality, and these never change. What distinguishes apparently different stages of liberalism…classical liberalism from modern liberalism, for example…is not any difference in liberalisms but a difference in the admixture of other elements that modify or oppose it. Liberalism itself (putting aside, for the moment, its egalitarian element) is nothing but an effort to struggle free of restraints on the individual.
Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and the Declaration of Independence is an Enlightenment document. That means not only faith in the power of reason to build a just and stable social order, but also emphasis on the individual as the building block of society. The Enlightenment optimists made a serious mistake about the nature of the individual human in whom they placed so much faith. Robert Nisbet notes that the men who laid down the principles of liberalism…Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Jefferson, for instance…thought “such traits as sovereign reason, stability, security, and indestructible motivations toward freedom and order” constituted the nature of man, that man was “inherently self-sufficing, equipped by nature with both the instincts and the reason that could make him autonomous.”1
What we can now see with the advantage of hindsight is that, unconsciously, the founders of liberalism abstracted certain moral and psychological attributes from a social organization and considered these the timeless, natural qualities of the individual, who was regarded as independent of the influences of any historically developed social organization…. A free society…. would be composed, in short, of socially and morally separated individuals. Order in society would be the product of a natural equilibrium of economic and political forces.2
The American Founders shared those sentiments. Jefferson said, “the Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions….” Gordon Wood comments that “Americans, like others in those years, … posit[ed] this natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being…. It made benevolence and indeed moral society possible.”3
Men with such views of human nature would naturally continually emphasize liberty. Though they surely did not envision a society resembling ours, they set in motion a tendency that, carried far enough, could and often did eventually free the individual from almost all moral and legal constraints. (Again, I am speaking of areas of life where radical egalitarianism does not hold sway.) The tendency is forwarded by persons for whom that prospect is attractive. This form of liberalism was powerfully stated and carried to what may seem its logical conclusion in 1859 with the publication of John Stuart Mills On Liberty. Mill advanced “one very simple principle”: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection…. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.”4 The individual is to be free both of legal penalties and the “moral coercion of public opinion.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that Mill contradicted his own principle in other, far less libertarian writings both before and after On Liberty, though he did so without mentioning the contradictions.5 Although in On Liberty he argued that every idea was to be examined and opposed in order to approach truth, elsewhere Mill wrote that it is essential to the stability of society that some fundamental principles of the system of social union be held sacred and above discussion. Although On Liberty called for freedom of action, individuality, even eccentricity, for the discovery of new practices, new modes of living, what some today might call “alternative lifestyles,” elsewhere Mill praised restraining discipline and the subordination of the individual’s impulses and aims to the ends of society.
It is instructive of the temper of our times that it is the Mill of On Liberty who is widely known and admired while the non-libertarian writings of the man Ms. Himmelfarb calls the “other Mill” are far less often read or cited. It is typical that a law school casebook designed for the study of the first amendment is dedicated to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Stuart Mill. I don’t think the author was saluting the “other Mill.”
Mill’s “one very simple principle” is, of course, both impossible and empty. Impossible, because the complex relations of the individual and his society cannot be reduced to a single rule. If that could be done, we should have arranged our society in conformance with the best rule, or at least some single rule, long ago, but all of human history shows that is not the way any real society has ever operated. The principle is empty, because, as stated, it does not really tell us much. Mill thought he knew what conduct of a man concerns others, but the others will often have quite different ideas about what concerns them, and there is no reason why their opinions on that subject are not as valid as, or entitled to more weight than, Mill’s.
Depending on how the harm is defined, so that the right of self-protection is triggered, the principle can lead either to tyranny or license or any condition in between: tyranny if a community defines harm as encompassing even Anthony Comstock’s psychological anguish at not being certain that private immorality is not taking place; license if only physical or material injury counts as harm. In the first case, the television lenses of the Comstockian moral police would peer everywhere. We would live in Orwell’s Nineteen Eigh
ty-Four. In the second case, there could be no laws or even moral coercion, for example, about prostitution, indecent exposure, public drunkenness, obscenity, and the like. There is no reason whatever why a community should not decide that there are moral and aesthetic pollutions it wishes to prohibit. Though Mill elsewhere assumed standards of decency…the restraints of law, religion, and morality…that would make his principle less dangerous, this passage contains no such explicit safeguards, and events have proved that standards of decency erode rather quickly. It is difficult not to agree with the man Ms. Himmelfarb calls the “other Mill” rather than with the one who devised “one very simple principle” that underlies today’s rage for liberty, or what our forefathers more accurately called license.
Nevertheless, Mill’s influence remains pervasive, a testament to the power of an idea that has been repeatedly refuted to continue to dominate the sentiments of men and hence a culture. Perhaps, Ms. Himmelfarb suggests, that is because “‘One very simple principle’ is always more seductive than a complicated, nuanced set of principles. And this particular principle is all the more appealing because it conforms to the image of the modern, liberated, autonomous, ‘authentic’ individual.”6 There is a popular notion that expanding the sphere of liberty is always a net gain. That is, quite obviously, wrong. If it were true, our ultimate goal should be the elimination of all law and all the restraints imposed by social disapproval. That condition of moral anarchy seems to be one we are constantly approaching but can never finally reach.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 7
