Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read online

  SDS and the Port Huron Statement did not create the temper of the Sixties out of nothing. They coalesced the restless discontents of their generation. While most student rebels did not belong to SDS, the Port Huron Statement repays attention: it was the most widely circulated document of the Left in that decade, brought SDS to national prominence, and its notions became the common currency of the New Left. The New Left is important because it is still with us in the guise of modern liberalism. What was composed at Port Huron, therefore, is a guide to today’s cultural and political debacles.

  The pronouncements of the Sixties radicals were intellectually negligible, often farcical. But many of us were naive enough at the time to assess them, and their capacity for destruction, in intellectual terms. Had we known more about past Utopian movements, we would have seen that the Port Huron Statement, though nonsense, was also a document of ominous mood and aspiration.

  “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love,” SDS proclaimed. The phrase “unfulfilled capacities” was substituted for the statement in Hayden’s draft that man was “infinitely perfectible.” (A few religious delegates objected that men cannot achieve perfection on earth.) Hayden’s original words, which were not that different from the replacement words, expressed the view, common to totalitarian movements, that human nature is infinitely malleable so that a new, better, and perhaps perfect nature can be produced by the rearrangement of social institutions. Since actual humans resist attempts to remake their natures, coercion and, ultimately, violence will be required. The initial rhetoric of the movement, however, before disillusion set in, was one of peaceful aspiration.

  “[H]uman brotherhood must be willed … as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations.” This is but one of many references to equality of condition throughout the document. The talk of brotherhood, of man’s unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love, and of radical equality was, and proved to be, dangerously unrealistic. Without reference to a supernatural Being, SDS was proposing, largely through politics, to bring their secular vision of the kingdom of God to fruition on earth, now. It is an ideal that the most devout and active Christians have never remotely approximated for any community larger than a monastery, and probably not in any monastery.

  SDS’ search for a shortcut to heaven was in the spirit of millenarianism, a phenomenon well-known in the history of Christianity. In the Middle Ages, historian Paul Johnson informs us, “The official Church was conventional, orderly, hierarchical, committed to defend Society as it existed, with all its disparities and grievances. But there was also, as it were, an anti-Church, rebellious, egalitarian, revolutionary, which rejected society and its values and threatened to smash it to bits.”23

  The millenarian seizure of Munster in Germany is a case in point. It was a brief reign of communism (all food and valuables taken by the government, housing reallocated on the basis of need), forced polygamy (women who refused were summarily executed), and frequent executions for a long list of infractions, including complaining and disobedience. When the town was retaken, the millenarian leader, I was almost pleased to learn, “was led about like a performing animal until January 1536, when he was publicly tortured to death with red-hot tongs.”24 “It is a tragic but recurrent feature of Christianity that the eager pursuit of reform tends to produce a ruthlessness in dealing with obstacles to it which brings the whole moral superstructure crashing down in ruins.”25 SDS made the same mistakes about the possibility of creating a paradise on earth, ruthlessly attacked the moral superstructure, but did not, some may think unfortunately, suffer similar consequences.

  Real human beings do not have any unfulfilled capacity for love, or at least not a large one; they simply do not regard men as infinitely precious, whatever the homilist may say on Sunday; and they lack the boundless energy and selflessness required to will themselves to brotherhood. Any program for society based on such vapors is headed for disaster. The real ideals, perceptions, and interests of humans differ and conflict, and always will. Attempts to suppress aggression entirely and to substitute love, being unnatural, will finally erupt in greater aggression. When Utopians are frustrated in the realization of their vision by the real nature of humans, who are then seen as perversely evil, they can turn nasty and violent. Others will engage in moral assault. SDS did both, and other student radicals followed them.

  “The goal of man and society should be … finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” How was that to be done? “[P]olitics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.” Nowhere is one informed what “meaning in personal life” might be. It is an amorphous concept, held by the SDSers in much the same way as the New England clergyman who said that whenever he tried to imagine God, all he conjured up was a “sort of oblong blur.” Nor is it at all clear why politics is necessary to meaning. One supposes that any number of fathers and mothers, religious people, scientists, novelists, philosophers, businessmen, et al. have found meaning in their lives without resort to politics. Note that politics seems to be the only way of escaping isolation and coming into community, a proposition that assumes the only real and significant communities are political.

  The search for a “politics of meaning” is a feature of modern liberalism, and reflects the human yearning for the transcendental by persons for whom religion no longer fills that need. But politics as a transcendental value cannot be satisfied by the compromises and partial successes of democratic processes. Transcendental politics requires the absolute, and necessarily moves, as far as circumstances permit, towards authoritarian or totalitarian models. Modern liberalism displays that tendency, which, fortunately, is frustrated by the structure of American government, the party system, and most Americans’ distrust of excessive zeal.

  The notion that politics is a necessary means of finding meaning in personal life also necessarily leads to the politicization of all areas of life and culture, summed up in the phrase used by feminists and others that “the personal is political and the political is personal.” Politics is always and inevitably about power. Personal relationships are, therefore, inevitably power relationships. The radical feminist branch of modern liberalism, to take one example, sees all male-female interactions, including marriage, as power relationships…a view that does not do a lot of good for marriages and families.

  The longing for personal authenticity appears to be common in radical movements. “By the height of the [French] Revolution in 1793-94,” sociologist Robert Nisbet tells us, “the passion for authenticity was almost uncontrollable among the revolutionaries. The Revolution began to devour its own, keeping the guillotine working overtime in the execution of even high officials like Robespierre for the crime of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘inauthenticity.’”26 As Lionel Trilling wrote, after the spirit of the Sixties generation had become manifest, “‘[Authenticity’…. is a word of ominous import…. [It] is implicitly a polemical concept, fulfilling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion, aesthetic opinion in the first instance, social and political opinion in the next.”27 It is a word associated with extreme autonomy as well, but as Trilling also pointed out, one can be certain of one’s authenticity only by knowing that one has achieved that state in the opinion of others, which is a contradiction of the extreme autonomy sought. To judge one’s own independence through the opinions of others is to forfeit independence.

  That is precisely what the Sixties radicals did. They prized individualism so greatly that it turned them into egalitarian conformists. What made them individualists was their rejection of American culture and bourgeois morals. What made them egalitarians was also their rejection of American culture and bourgeois morals. Since none of them aspired to an aristocracy or to asceticism, they had to reject bourgeois hierarchies and morals from the other direc
tion. This translated as foul language, sexual promiscuity, marijuana and hard drugs, and disdain for the military and for conventional success. Since these were the only “authentic” ways to think and behave, the student radicals eagerly became what Harold Rosenberg once characterized as a “herd of independent minds.”

  “In social change or interchange,” said SDS, “we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate.” This sentiment is particularly poignant in retrospect since some in SDS, within a very few years, became violent. A few years after Port Huron, its organization’s offshoot and legitimate heir, the Weathermen, organized the Days of Rage riots in Chicago. At a subsequent “War Council,” Tom Hayden led the Weathermen in “a workout of karate jabs and kicks” for a “strenuous fifteen minutes” in preparation for armed struggle.28 Port Huron’s professions of love and brotherhood had, predictably, turned to rage and attack, both physical and moral, when society would not accept brotherhood on SDS’s terms.

  The relentless message of the Port Huron Statement was that America was corrupt from top to bottom. Grave and critical faults that required sweeping change were found with American foreign policy, corporations, labor unions, old-style liberalism, universities, race relations, economic arrangements, military preparations, government, political parties, the desire for material goods, and much more. People with such a view of their society could not respect its institutions, its leaders, its moral tone, or accept a process of gradual reform.

  “The final session [drafting the Statement] lasted all night and then the delegates walked down to Lake Huron; some held hands as they watched the sun rise. ‘It felt like the dawn of a new age,’” one of them said, ‘“It was exalting…. We thought we knew what had to be done, and that we were going to do it.’”29

  In the Sixties the spirit and the exaltation expressed at Port Huron played out across the country and produced a massive lurch to the left among university students. SDS grew from 600 members in 1963 to over 100,000 in 1968, but then collapsed in 1969 into hostile factions and in the end consisted only of a small group of Maoists. SDS had been the center of the New Left, but contrary to some’ accounts,30 the shattering of SDS did not mean the collapse of the New Left. The New Left was a confused and confusing movement of radicals lacking any fixed center. After 1969, it remained that for several years more. This was simply an uncritically anti-American leftishness, not at all like the disciplined and programmatic older Left, exemplified by the Communist Party. Being unprogrammatic, the New Left’s ideas of where they wanted to take the nation ran the gamut of leftist sentiments from amorphous to vaporous. They did not have doctrine; they had youth, self-righteousness, euphoria, and, many of them, ultimately, fury.

  The young are naturally romantic and given to moral absolutes that necessarily make the real world of compromises, half-measures, and self-seeking appear corrupt. A youth culture, particularly in times of rapid social change, like the Sixties, is likely to develop a passionate adherence to principle, and the principles for a new age and a better world were at hand in articulations of the liberal elders. But the elders had not taken those principles seriously enough; they had compromised. The Sixties young were, therefore, in opposition not only to the larger society in general but to traditional liberals in particular.†

  Their politics was expressive of attitudes rather than practical means to a stated goal. They regularly announced a “revolution” but, a few Weathermen terrorists aside, did little more than disrupt, confront, destroy property, paralyze universities, denounce America, and scream obscenities. “Relatively unconcerned with the long-term consequences of their actions, the New Left student movement appeared ready to attack all existing structures, including the university, and to use tactics which alienated the majority, in order to make manifest their contempt, their total rejection of the intolerable world created by their elders.”31 The New Left may have practiced a politics of expression and self-absorption, but that did not mean the politics was innocuous. To the contrary, it did serious, lasting, and perhaps permanent damage to valuable institutions, socially stabilizing attitudes, and essential standards.

  The revolt was against the entire American culture. The United States, it was said, was engaged in an immoral war only because the United States itself was deeply immoral, being racist, sexist, authoritarian, and imperialistic. The arrangements of the liberal capitalist order were themselves illegitimate, conferring power where none was deserved and withholding power from the poor and minorities. The bourgeois class, which sustained and benefitted from these societal arrangements, was, therefore, oppressive. It followed that bourgeois morality and standards of excellence were part of the apparatus that supported the status quo and repressed the individual. Destruction was, therefore, the only legitimate response.

  That is what I did not understand as I stood over the smoldering books outside the Yale law school.

  2

  What They Did and Where They Went

  Epiphanies: they made the world worthy of us. We searched for them like stargazers. This was part of the decades transcendental conviction that there was something apocalyptic lurking behind the veil of the ordinary, and that just a little more pressure was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane—of civility, bourgeois consciousness, corporate liberalism, sexual uptightness, or whatever else prevented us all from breaking through to the other side.1

  That was the authentic voice of adolescent Sixties radicalism…impatient, destructive, nihilistic. Modern liberalism is its mature stage. The temporary abeyance of the Sixties temper was due to the radicals graduating from the universities and becoming invisible until they reached positions of power and influence, as they now have, across the breadth of the culture. They no longer have need for violence or confrontation: since the radicals control the institutions they formerly attacked, the Sixties temper manifests itself in subtler but no less destructive ways.

  What the radicals did in the Sixties illuminates their mood and goals today. How the besieged “Establishment” responded tells a great deal about the softness and self-doubt that had come to afflict American cultural leaders even before they were assailed. We are currently being fed revisionist histories that paint student rebellion and hedonism of that time as idealism and excitement. No doubt that is partly due to the nostalgia of the Sixties generation for a time when everything seemed possible. But the revisionism also serves to consolidate the Left’s cultural victories of that decade. Rewritten history has always been a weapon in the struggle for control of the present and the future. The true version of what took place is to be consigned to the memory hole. The radicalism of those times, we are informed, was a reaction against the cold war culture of the Fifties by idealistic students who sought to break free of the deadening intellectual conformity, spiritual emptiness, and social injustices of their parents’ generation. The truth, as any accurate account of the times makes plain, is otherwise.

  One of the more egregious pieces of revisionism appeared, appropriately enough, in a New York Times editorial, “In Praise of the Counterculture.”2 The Times, whose editorial page and some of its regular columns seem to have been handed over to a group of unregenerate Sixties radicals, remarks of that decade: “Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition.” If that statement is accurate, and it may well be, then, as the state of our current culture attests, the American intellectual tradition has a lot to answer for. The Times even manages to say that the decade’s “summery, hedonistic ethos then and now reduced modern puritans to fits of twisting discomfort. America is still close enough to the frontier experience of relentless work and danger to view any kind of fun with suspicion.” That is an exceedingly odd description of a society positively addicted to fun: television sitcoms, sensational
motion pictures, rock and rap music, recreational sex and drugs, spectator and participatory sports, Disneyland vacations. The “fun” viewed with suspicion then and now involved such “summery” pastimes as hard drug use and sexual anarchy. To cap this litany of Sixties-era fatuities, the editorial solemnly pronounces that the counterculture is “part of us, a legacy around which Americans can now unite, rather than allow themselves to be divided.” There is no possibility that Americans will unite around that legacy. Those of us who regard the Sixties as a disaster are not “allowing” ourselves to be divided; we insist on it. Opposition to the counterculture, the culture that became today’s liberalism, is precisely what our culture war is about.

  Perhaps more books have been written about the Sixties than any other decade in American history with the exception of times of war or the decade of the Great Depression. Some of those books have been analytical, some factual, most are admiring. But there is a different story to tell, and that story focuses on the universities, for it was there that the cadres of the new liberalism first appeared.

  THE SACKING OF THE UNIVERSITIES

  The campus madness may have started at Berkeley, but “it was the Ivy League that was ultimately to set the pace in the retreat of reason.”3 When the first demonstrations broke out at Yale, a visiting professor pointed out that it was organized by a transfer student from Berkeley. At every university, he said, the first eruptions could be traced to a radical who had “come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Berkeley.” Yale had for years been politically liberal, no department more so than the law school. I was one of two Republicans on a faculty of about forty-five. When it was proposed that we hire a man who might possibly have been a third, he was rejected, one faculty member remarking that he would “tip the balance.”