NEW RADICALISM
537
The easiest thing is to dismiss these words as extreme revolu–
tionary romanticism, as a fantasy growing out of the New Left's
frustration with a repressive, machine-dominated, bureaucratized
po–
litical order. And one may sympathize with their desire for the
ultimate
demonstration as a means of breaking through the walls of cold
power with a mass of warm flesh and blood.
Indeed, has not Staughton Lynd's vision at some time or other
visited every radical--especially radicals uprooted from the middle
classes, powerful in their ideas but impotent in their individual aliena–
tion? Of course. But the democratic radicals have held the vision in
check by raising certain questions which I fear have gone out of
fashion in New Left circles, submerged under their catchall phrase
"participatory democracy." One cannot escape the feeling that "parti–
cipatory democracy"
is
being counterposed, not merely to the empty
formalisms of "representative democracy" as historically evolved under
American capitalism, but to the essential structural guarantees of
political democracy that must prevail in any social system that would
call itself democratic.
To get to the point: under whose mandate are the 20,000
Washington marchers entitled to occupy "their government" for even
ten minutes? Does Lynd believe that they represented the views of
anything approaching a majority of the American people on the ques–
tion of Vietnam? On the contrary, the public opinion polls all revealed
substantial majorities in support of Administration policies. What
gives the disaffected sons and daughters of the middle class the right
even symbolically to become the government?
How frustrating that the majority will not see the light and
accept the wisdom (and there
is
wisdom) of the enlightened! Since
they will not, the enlightened minority has one of three choices:
(1) It can fight for its point of view in the hope of becoming a major–
ity. (2) It can give up the fight and withdraw into privacy. (3) It
can proclaim itself the majority and attempt to seize power.
The first course
is
what democratic radicals would advocate; the
second we reject as complicity in present evil. As for the third, take
away its romantic coatings, its existential audacity, and the personal
warmth of its exponents, and you have ... putschism. There is no
more accurate way to characterize the political event inbedded in
Lynd's vision than as a
coup d'etat,
albeit nonviolent. Elsewhere in his
