NEW RADICALISM
35
the kind of change "the new radicals"2 want. From innumerable
dif–
ferent traditions, most of us come out of that literate community, and
we are in despair about
it.
(Perhaps I should not allow myself the
"we"; I am not very sure whom I speak for besides myself.) Most
of the people who should understand the condemnations of Ameri–
can domestic and foreign policy which student organizers take
for granted wind up on the wrong side of confrontations. Not
only confrontations like the MFDP challenge in Atlantic City,
which Mike Harrington refuses to understand, but confrontations
within
universities, about the right of a professor to welcome the
victory of the Vietcong .and still keep his job; confrontations within
city politics, when self-styled liberals suddenly hedge at the demands
for adequate representation of the poor on anti-poverty councils;
confrontations within the peace movement, when veteran pacifists
suddenly find a slap at Johnson's speciousness "irresponsible" and
read Communist take-over into a declared policy of nonexclusion.
What I think the experience within the fledgling organizing projects
results in is a sense that the entire literate, liberal community can
rarely bel trusted to understand either the depth of the commitment
to change or the necessity for it; one can depend on specific people
for support of all kinds, but the community is so locked into the present
institutional structure, and its assumptions-through their roles, pro–
fessions, reputations-that at significant moments they will tum on the
organizers as "too militant" or "irresponsible" or "pursuing a no–
victory policy."
Let me try to make one example clear. I said that Mike Har–
rington still refuses to understand the MFDP
cause celebre
in
Atlantic
City. Not accurate; in one sense he understands it too well. He is
precise when he argues that no morality was involved in the com–
promise, because the MFDP -delegation came prepared to compromise.
They understood, through years of necessity, that the Democratic Con–
vention was not about to unseat the white Mississippians and seat
them; they knew that most of the Democratic delegates wished they
had never come to present their demands. They also knew their de–
mands were not only completely legitimate, but embarrassing, and on a
2 I use quotation marks for "the new radicals" because it is an applied, and
not a chosen, label. I prefer the new activists as a label, because, as far as I can
tell, few of them are certain about whether their work has resulted in the estab–
lishment of political positions which: could meaningfully be called radical.
