I am not merely succumbing to nostalgia and delusions about the good old days. I remember once being stopped by police as I was returning home from a camping trip with a group of friends. My neighborhood was under a state of siege in the aftermath of some demonstrations. The police found nothing amiss and packed us back in our van, but then sprayed Mace on us before sending us on our way. There is a cautionary tale in each of these histories about abuse of government power that deserves telling—and remembering.
But for all these books have to offer, there is still something missing. In an essay in Bunzel’s book, Joseph Epstein opines: “The sixties, I have come to believe, are something of a political Rorschach test. Tell me what you think of that period and I shall tell you what your politics are. Tell me that you think the period both good and bad, with much to be said for and against it, and you are, whether you know it or not, a liberal. Tell me that you think the sixties a banner time for American life...and you are doubtless a radical….Tell me that you think the sixties a time of horrendous dislocation, a disaster nearly averted…and I shall tell you—well, I am not sure what you are precisely, but your views, friend, are close to mine and I am pleased to meet you.” (He means, of course, that you are a conservative or a neoconservative or something along those lines.)
Epstein is wrong. He is wrong because he makes the same error that Hayden, Gitlin, Miller, and other New Left spokespersons make. It is the error of focusing on the exceptional and mistaking it for the rule.
Epstein thinks the ‘60s was a sorry time, a blight, a pox on American history, because he doesn’t like socialism nor the drug-besotted, middle-aged dropouts now lingering in Haight-Ashbury. Of this scraggly crowd, he muses, “What you do with your own life is your own business, but I’m awfully glad that, in the battle of competing visions, yours lost.”
But what vision is-he talking about? Leftist ideology and libertine culture were not widely representative features of the ‘60s. Huey Newton and Tim Leary may have made headlines, but their views and their actions did not epitomize the ‘60s. Antiwar sentiment was widespread; antiAmericanism was not. Drug use was widespread; drug abuse was not.
The vision Epstein detests is a mythical one conjured up by giving importance to headlines rather than reality; to mediamakers rather than the oft-invoked, but usually misconstrued, masses. Mythical vision in hand, Epstein then concludes that if you thought the ‘60s were part good, part bad you must be a liberal. You must be a liberal (but not a radical) because, presumably, you disliked the episodes of violence, thought Charles Manson a pariah, and the Weathermen antiheros. At the same time, you liked Martin Luther King, Tom Hayden (or at least Joan Baez), and Ralph Nader.
There is, however, another way to read the ’60s that permits nonliberals to find good and bad in those turbulent years by recognizing something left out of Epstein’s vision. It is this missing history that New Left chroniclers of the ’60s, like their counterparts among many “ second thoughts” conservatives, cannot see because both are too preoccupied with politics and elites.
An obsession with political power as the wellspring of meaningful living—a dusty inheritance from the Old Left—is at the root of all that was wrong about New Left ideology. It is also the cause for much misplaced analysis by Hayden, Gitlin, and especially Miller.
New Left ideology, drawing heavily from sociologist C. Wright Mills, assumed that political power is the key to personal happiness, to personal power over one’s own life. As Gitlin describes, “the centrality of the res publica, the public thing, took the form of insisting the personal was political—that power was present in every aspect of everyday life, from housework to homework.” So too was politics perceived as the great forger of community ties: “Politics,” wrote Hayden in the Port Huron Statement, “has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.”
The New Left drew heavily from Rousseau, as well. Like Rousseau, they viewed man as perfectible and believed in his infinite capabilities, through politics, to engineer a more perfect world. They played up the role of the intellectual— and of rational planning—to direct human affairs, neglecting the knowledge of experience, tradition, and what F. A. Hayek has so brilliantly described as spontaneous order.
This emphasis had consequences. On the one hand, the New Left vociferously opposed “big government.” On the other hand, by wanting a society in which everything flowed from politics, they prescribed a world of big government. Walter Lippman hit the nail on the head when he protested this view, warning that “the false ideal of democracy…can only lead to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny limiting individual freedom.”
In retrospect, Hayden and Gitlin, though not Miller, sense this problem. For Hayden, the dilemma became a personal one: “We had become isolated, self-enclosed in a universe of political rather than human life. In this sealed universe, social relationships were centered within organization, language turned to jargon, disputes were elevated to doctrinal heights.”
But although Hayden and Gitlin intermittently acknowledge the pitfalls of their vision of politics as preeminent, for the most part they remain locked into this paradigm—a paradigm impoverished by failure to understand even the basic workings of a decentralized society and economy. The result is a historical account that is overwhelmingly elitist—and radically wrong. They are wrong about the mainstream of the world they inhabited in the 1960s. They are wrong about their contemporary protagonists in the counterculture and antiwar movement of the ’60s. And they are dead wrong about economics.
The New Left, seeing political action and public decisions as the only ones that count, wrote off their parents as unthinking “cheerful robots”—a phrase borrowed from C. Wright Mills. Miller, parroting Mills’ assessment, describes America’ as “a herd of blank drones drifting vacantly through the shopping malls of America.” And Hayden describes a similar American, “going about business as usual while denying the existence of pervasive and threatening evils.”
This view of middle America is a direct consequence of perceiving politics as the only fount of meaningful decision making. It never occurred to New Left thinkers (and still seems only vaguely realized by them now) that people in the ’50s were making important decision about their lives. This had been a time of opportunity and choice after a decade of depression followed by a decade of war.
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