NEW RADICALISM
369
If
the poor were becoming more militant and becoming aware
of
themselves as a group, that is,
if
some millions and tens of millions
of
people were becoming radical, then the rejection of coalition
politics that is so often characteristic of the new radicalism would
make some sense.
If
this were the situation, there would be no reason
to
subordinate the radical instincts of the masses to the meliorist
bureaucracies of labor, liberalism and church. To be sure, even then
coalition would still be necessary in order to achieve a political
majority, but the terms of the alliance would be dictated from
below. I suggest to you that American life is not so simple and never
will
be.
Strangely enough, the new radicalism's ultra-Left agrees with
my analysis here. They too see no imminent prospect of revolutionary
change-no new proletariat-within the United States. But their
conclusion is a militant despair. In a vague and confused way, they
look for eventual salvation from the revolutionary Third World forces.
Domestically, they tend toward symbolic and even kamikase-like
action. This tendency is difficult to discuss, so let me return to the
mood, the style and the tactics which actually separate the old from
the new radicals.
Your remarks, Nat, on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
at Atlantic City are extremely relevant here. For you, and most of the
new radicals, have made of that issue a major dividing line. You even
write that the MFDP's refusal of the convention compromise "will be
seen in retrospect to have been one of the watersheds of the new
radicalism . . .
if
this politics-by-the-poor approach proves viable...."
In arguing your case, like most of the new radicals, you confuse
tactic and principle. It is certainly true that a dispute over tactics can
get bitter and nasty, but that still does not justify your division of
radicalism into two categories, the old and the new, the irrelevant
and
the relevant.
To have stayed outside Convention Hall would have been a
defensible tactic. The civil rights movement could then have exposed
the concessions and compromises made by a party that still embraces
New Dealers and slave dealers.
It
might even have called on the best
people in that party to leave and join the Movement in independent
political action against
both
major parties. (This is the hallowed,
spectacularly unsuccessful nostrum of traditional American radicals.)
