344
IRVING HOWE
Obviously there is no magical stroke or strategy for the problems
faced by American radicals:
if
there were, someone would by now
have discovered it. I am myself committed to the "coalition" ap–
proach, which proposes that efforts be made to bring together into
loose and intermittent association the major progressive forces of the
country-labor, Negro, liberals, church groups, intellectuals, students
-in order to work for current and intermediate goals. Socialism not
being an immediate option in this country,
it
is necessary for socialists,
while continuing to propagate their ideas in full, also to try to energize
those forces that are prepared to stretch the limits of the welfare
state. Such a dynamic once set in motion, there may be possibilities
for going still further; but any political approach which dismisses
in
advance movements that represent the hard-won victories of yesterday
must, I think, doom itself to sectarianism and isolation. The strategy
I am suggesting here has many difficulties, not the least that it isn't
very "dramatic." For young people who have just "made it" into
radicalism, it even seems insufficiently radical. But radicalism is neither
a quantity nor a way of measuring one's purity and rectitude; it is a
political outlook ; and if a rough adaptation of Fabianism
is
a
p0s–
sibility for us, then we must seize upon it with
all
the energy we have.
4. What
is
most- finally, the only thing that is profoundly–
disturbing
abou~
ct-.c "new radicalism" is that a portion of its adherents
has slid, almost without serious consideration, into support for totali–
tarian and authoritarian regimes. Only rarely is this a matter of
membership in a Communist or near-Communist organization: here
the categories of the past do not apply at all. What is involved is a
kind of political tropism, a head-long response based on impatience,
lack of knowledge, and a cultivated disdain for recent history.
Few of the "new radicals" feel much attachment to Russia.
Precisely as it has turned away from the more extreme and terroristic
version of totalitarianism, so have they begun to find it unsatisfactory
as a model: too Victorian and "bourgeois." When the "new Leftists"
turn to politics they have little concern for clear or precise thought.
What attracts them
is
the surface of vitality, the appearance of
freshness, the drama of gesture. Several years ago they were likely
to be drawn to Maoist China, which then seemed bolder than
Khrushchev's Russia. But the Mao regime proved too grim and
repressive. Since then they have been searching for new models and
