Failure on the Left

WASHINGTON LETTER By ARNOLD BEICHMAN THE most serious radical intellectual and political writer in America today by far is Irving Howe, literary critic, professor of English at the City University of New York and editor of the socialist magazine, Dissent. More so than most American intellectuals, Howe has been engaged in a re-evaluation of his ideas and his socialist philosophy. At the same time, he has sought to avoid estrangement from the young university radicals (or, as Michael Har- rington calls them, the mystical militants) who seem to believe that the way to make history is to ignore it. Howe has also concerned himself with the American left—old and 'new'—and why it seemingly can make no contact with the people it most wants to influence. Recently Howe wrote that he was disturbed that the Vietnam protest movement 'is perhaps the first of its kind that seems largely confined to students, professors and intellectuals without much support in the population at large' meaning, as he said, the labour unions, the negro organisations, the churches and ethnic minorities.

Howe, of course, is only one of many Ameri- can left intellectuals who have risen on a crest of interest in new forms of political thinking (and non-thinking). The radical thinkers, like Howe, seem almost rootless in that, on the one hand, they are moving, like quasars, rapidly away from what was once the inevitable Marxist base; and, on the other hand, they seem unable `to rear an imagination of society,' in Lionel Trilling's phrase. What can one say about so excessive an apostrophe as that of Professor Staughton Lynd—`the poor, when they find voice, will produce a truer, sounder radicalism than any which alienated intellectuals might pre- scribe'? Meanwhile, Lynd goes right on pre- scribing—Way I inquire why it is immoral to desire a Vietcong victory?' he asked in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. To which, Howe responded : 'Because, Mr Lynd, a victory for a Communist or Communist- dominated movement means another totalitarian dictatorship suppressing human freedoms.'

Though Howe and Lynd represent clashing extremes within the American left, they and their followers are both severely hampered by an inability to produce a coherent literary radical- ism. As a recognisable mood or influence, literary radicalism in America seems to have flourished between the two wars with such avatars as Dreiser, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Dos Passos. Actually, it never had as much of a hold in America as it did in Europe with Gide, Sartre, Malraux, Silone, Aragon, Spender. Whatever literary radicalism persists in America arises from such negro writers as James Baldwin and Leroi Jones, for whom there is one enemy, 'Whitey.' Such an approach produced little (except corpses) when the enemy was the `Jew' or the 'Catholic' or the 'Albigensian,' and it will produce even less as the black `Jacksonians' fire away at Mister Charley.

Men like Howe, Harrington or Bayard Rustin, our 'Rote Kapelle,' seem unable to create more than discussion societies where, as often as not, they find a sense of discomfort among the bearded young anarchs, whose leader, Thomas Hayden, recently wrote in Partisan Review:

Perhaps the only forms of action appropriate to the angry people are violent. Perhaps a small minority, by setting ablaze New York and Washington, could damage this country forever in the court of world opinion. [My italics.]

From such counsel little can be expected except a sort of mad, frustrated Bolshevism which will produce its quota of busted heads and bloody (but unbowed) noses, but hardly anything else of moment. Even the official Communist party seems disturbed about the errant radicalism of the new left.

The footlessness of the new left can be set down in a series of observations: 1. It has no apparent political sense about organisation, or how to create an apparat.

2. It is anti-anybody over thirty years of age (except for Mao Tse-tung), which is all right, except it's a hell of a way to win elections or revolutions. Most student revolutionaries in Latin America and South-East Asia are 'per- manent' students, as anybody who has met them in Saigon or Caracas can attest.

3. It has no interest in what happened in history, so that it fails to appreciate that revo- lutions have been made by middle-class insur- gents (as in Castro's Cuba) and dispossessed literary radicals, and that these revolutions can just as well go against 'proletarian dictatorship' -Hungary, Indonesia, Ghana, Algeria—as for it.

4. Nothing awful personally seems to have happened to the leaders of the new left. Young American Jews in the 'thirties could become Stalinists because they could see that Hitler's fascism meant them and that they could always flee to the fairyland, Biro-bidjan, if things soured in America. There was also a depres- sion, the disillusion after the First World War.

5. The new left leadership is as solidly middle-class in origin as a country club. There is virtually no relationship between them and the American trade union movement except hostility.

6. The new left concern with Vietnam is not truly a concern with American foreign policy or international politics. Vietnam is merely the most convenient stick with which to beat America.

7. America's new left has little organised interest in the apartheid struggle or economic development of the ex-colonial world or in much of anything beyond the American campus. It talks a good civil rights fight and a good anti-poverty fight, but it couldn't be less interested in current legislative battles to raise the national minimum wage or in organising low-wage workers.

For me, the most important observation is the first—no real political sense. There is simply no substitute for precinct politics in America, as the left—and the right—never seem to under- stand. Of course, if a new leftist wants to go right on posturing wildly about violence and revolution, it's all right, but nothing happens. Personally, I think the boutonniere slogan, 'Make Love Not War,' is just great, but it doesn't make votes any more than do the little old ladies on the right who wear those comfortable low white sneakers. I am mindful that much of what I've said has a complaisant, self-satisfied sound, as if I were predicting that the Dow-Jones would hit 1,000 before August 1. I do not mean to be so exultant. We really do need a coherent radicalism in America, we really do need the most coherent kind of criticism, particularly about foreign policy and international economic programming.

I have waited in vain for a reassertion of useful literary radicalism, at least in the area of foreign policy. Instead, we have seen a group of American literary intellectuals 'psychoanalys- ing' the Johnson administration. Their spokes- man, Alfred Kazin, told a press conference here that the administration is suffering from 'a Hemingway syndrome: you can never be tough enough and you have to prove your masculinity.' He disclosed that Vice-President Humphrey's colleagues at the University of Minnesota felt `betrayed' by Humphrey's recent speeches. A rather withering reply to Mr Kazin came from thirty-three Minnesota University professors, headed by the distinguished Walter W. Heller, who said they were 'saddened by the irresponsi- bility of Mr Kazin's statement. Apparently he saddles us with his own thoughts and then pro- claims them as ours.'

This is a sample of the dreariness of Ameri- can literary radicalism or what is left of it: it will not do its homework so that its criticism of American foreign policy will have some sub- stance; it will not lift a finger of brotherhood to the nascent new left in the third world, nor will its exponents have the decency to go and live in Walden Pond or the courage to work for the Peace Corps in some rice paddy in Thailand; and it will not engage in precinct politics because it would be too beastly, or perhaps, as Saul Bellow put it, 'they are repelled by the effrontery of power and the degradation of the urban crowd.'

Early last June, the new left organised itself into the National Conference for New Politics, consisting of civil rights and anti-war militants and some Reform Democrats. The announce- ment, the statements, the people in it, the aims altogether have a déjà vu quality, like seeing the same newsreel. It is a group without any base— political, social or cultural—in American society, nor does it seem to feel the need to have a base. Its effect in the coming national elections will be minimal, which, I suspect, would satisfy its need for martyrdom arising from 'the impotence, irrelevance and despair attendant on the realisa- tion that what one feels, believes and demands are neither shared nor acted on by the over- whelming majority of one's society,' as an edi- torial in Studies on the Left expressed it.

It may be time to amend Charles P6guy's maxim—`tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.' For the new left in America, one says, . et finit en mystique.'