NEW RADICALISM
39
effected. Therefore Rustin insists on what is
realistic,
on what can
be
achieved through modifications of the present balance of power.
But let Rustin also be realistic enough to understand that in setting
out what he judges the realistic possibilities for change, and in urging
a politics aimed at those changes, he slurs his response to the greater
irrationalities of our society. Accepting Rustin's coalition politics means
accepting the current shape and value-patterns of the society in
which those reformist changes might be achieved. Several men of
Rustin's generation, and at least two of his colleagues, have written
despairing analyses of the irrationality, perversity and finally the in–
humanity that dogs this society; those books (Goodman'S
People and
Personnel,
Marcuse's
One-Dimensional Man,
Harrington's
The Ac–
cidental Century
are only three of the most recent) have become
required reading for the new activists. But read Rustin's article and
try
to find even a hint that he is still responding to the manifold
inequities of this society. The accents of what by now seems to me
an unanswerable critique of America's irrationality are absent in
Rustin; what we get instead is
Realpolitik.
6. The new activists are currently committed to a vision of change
beyond amelioration, transcending
Realpolitik.
Rustin understands that
they are not "rooted in an oppressed class," that "their motivation is
moral (not material), their quest is for new values, not programs."
It would be a simple step for Rustin to conclude that the new activists
are at that point in their lives when they are free to stand opposed
to the dominant values and the overriding rationale of
this
society.
But to grant the new activists that coherent an opposition would be
to grant them the possibility of
incipient
radicalism. Rustin concludes
that the new activists are most fundamentally opposed, not to the
basic structures of this current society, but to "hypocrisy, which is
seen as
the
crippling disease of the American cultural and social
order [Rustin's italics]." Rustin has confused response to symptom
with analysis of cause, substituted surface animosity for underlying
opposition. Having made
this
substitution, it is then simple to confound
the new activists with their middle-class backgrounds, their moral
motivations, their quest for "situations and experiences which are
affirmations of meaningful personal existences, ... a largely existential
search." A most vulgar determinism informs all the passages of Rustin's
article in which he tries to distinguish between real movements (i.e.,
those with a base, with numbers, with visible power), and the "ex-
