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BAYARD RUSTIN
is the age of insight-often penetrating, sometimes brilliant,
but . . . there is a bleak and dismal failure to relate much of
this fresh understanding to the process and needs of society.
This failure stems, I contend, from the absence of anything
that
can seriously or precisely be called a liberal-radical
movement
in
this
country. Only through such a movement, and not merely through the
assimilation of intellectuals into the government, can the relevance of
the intellectual community be reestablished. That movement is not
built by locating the most "radical" theses on some calibrated yard–
stick and projecting them onto masses in motion.
This is precisely the method by which some intellectuals, failing
to propose meaningful, feasible next steps, perpetuate their incapsula–
tion as a class apart. I trust I shall not be accused of anti-intel–
lectualism when I assert that in this state they develop bad habits.
Rendered inconsequential, they come to lack a sense of actual con–
sequence. Unnourished by a political movement, they are peculiarly
tempted into arrogant and elitist postures as a defense against
sterility.
Michael Harrington did not invent poverty. Where, before
him,
were the voices of the vast majority of intellectuals? What "radical"
esoteric pursuits had absorbed them? Martin Luther King did not
invent segregation. Where were the intellectuals then who today cry
"sell-out" and arrogate to themselves the right to tear up other people's
membership cards in "the movement"-that fragile and embryonic
stirring in America which some of us have struggled to sustain for
decades and whose growth and victory are even now by no means
absolutely assured?
I
The above may be thought crabby or negative. I intend it to
be
deflationary, to help restore a sense of perspective among the com–
ponents of the new radicalism, of which I consider myself a part. I
want that radicalism to flourish, to broaden its base, and to approxi–
mate, at least, power. It follows that I do not want it mired in an
exceedingly unoriginal existential subjectivism, or addicted to strategy
by temperament. For
it
is literally true that the aspirations of millions
of people, a good number of them black, will be profoundly affected
by what we build--or fail to build-now. Our strategy must be based,
