NEW RADICALISM
529
It
would be the grossest slander to say that they go slumming.
True, most of them will return to the larger society to claim the good
jobs for which their educational backgrounds qualify them. No matter;
they have made a noble choice, and many will benefit from it. So
long as they are in the movement, the question is: are they to be
taken seriously, or are they to be condescendingly patted on the head?
Here I suspect some of their best friends are among their worst ene–
mies. That is what happens when friendship becomes idolatry.
This, it strikes me, is precisely what has happened to create a
third component of the new radicalism-a relative handful of writers
and intellectuals who see in the Negro and student movements a po–
tential base for their ideas. These ideas range from one-dimensional
economic panaceas to new theories of protest, to world-historical no–
tions of the rise and fall of civilizations. I do not speak of them pejora–
tively. Throughout history such people have played an enormously
important catalytic role. One need only recall the great socialist
theoreticians. But they enjoyed an advantage of which modern Amer–
ican radical intellectuals have been deprived by history: a socialist
movement which gave their theories flesh and blood substance. Thus
deprived, today's radical intellectuals are more alienated, more iso–
lated, and more dependent for sustenance on their own theories than
any similar class I can think of. Worst of all for everybody, they have
not been conditioned to relate their production to the step-by-step
building of a movement, to strategies and programs. This is not to say
that they lack the capacity for specificity and detail; quite the contrary,
they have been conditioned by the general trends in the intellectual
and academic worlds toward the minutest specialization. Within their
special fields they may evolve radical ideas and interpretations-in
vacuo.
Former presidential assistant Richard Goodwin stated the prob–
lem well in a speech reported in the
Washington Post
(July 21,
1965) :
In other periods of challenge and forward movement, we have
had a fertile advance ground of thought towards which Gov–
ernment could move-from the economics of Lord Keynes to
the views of Louis Brandeis. Today with the exception of a
few men-men like Ken Galbraith and Michael Harrington
and Paul Goodman-this is not true. Of course much is being
written and said. The air is filled with the insights of sociology
and psychology, political science and public administration. This
