NEW RADICALISM
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new heroes, usually in the underdeveloped countries. Figures like
Lumumba, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno and above all Castro attract
them, suggesting the possibility of a politics not yet bureaucratized
and rationalized. But meanwhile they neglect to notice, or do not care,
that totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorship can set in even before
a society is fully modernized. They have been drawn to charismatic
figures like Castro out of a distaste for the mania for industrial pro–
duction that the Soviet Union shares with the United States; but
they fail to see that these leaders of the underdeveloped countries,
who seem attractive as agents of spontaneity and anarchic freedom,
are themselves infused with the same mania for industrial production.
And among the "new Leftists"--or, rather, among an especially vocal
segment of them (since others remain pledged to democratic values)
-this attachment to authoritarian regimes is accompanied by a
number of other political symptoms: a harsh and often unreflective
hostility to liberalism, which they see not as a great tradition of
freedom and tolerance, but in its current debased and "pragmatic"
state; an equally unreflective belief in "the decline of the West"
coupled with a good many naive notions about the underdeveloped
countries; a crude and unqualified anti-Americanism, etc.
Precisely at the time that so many intellectuals in the Communist
world have worked their way around to a "revisionist" outlook which
stresses the primacy of democratic values for any true socialism, here
in the United States among some of the "new Leftists" there is an
impulse in the other direction (so that, for example, entirely justified
protests against United States bombings in North Vietnam have some–
times been contaminated by sudden discoveries of the worthiness of
the Vietcong).
But there it is: a mixture of the attractive and disturbing, the
hopeful and alarming, in part the result of our earlier failures. Those
of us who speak for the democratic left have a job cut out for our–
selves, but with firmness, patience and intelligence our opinions should
have some effect. That job would become a little easier, I might add,
if
certain intellectuals of like persuasion would get off their hands
and help to create an American radicalism both militant and demo–
cratic.
