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NORM FRUCHTER
attempt to dragoon the new activists into accepting or supporting ,
his efforts? Both Rustin and the new activists are only beginning
their work, and the new activists are certainly not denying Rustin
the right to pursue his own policies. Why should not only Rustin,
but also the several other luminaries of that circuit of established
radicals now comfortably ensconced in teaching posts across the
country, be so hostile to the new activists' work? The new activists,
and their current community alliances, probably amount to no more
than 10,000 people across the country; their theoretical work is of
such low calibre that established radicals delight in staging sideshows
to demolish it; their political power is, at this writing, miniscule.
Finally, and most important, only protest politics and city-level reform
programs have emerged from their work; no elitist transformations
or totalitarian solutions have been advanced. Why should so modest
an attempt to transcend the current and bankrupt limits of established
American radicalism so panic such eminent men? Once I,
in
my
ignorance, imagined that the role of adult and established radicals
was to orient themselves toward younger activism, to attempt to
establish an instructive dialogue. What the new activists get from
Rustin and several of his colleagues, however, is abuse and arrogance.
Worse, it is a dangerous arrogance. For suppose I use Rustin's logic,
and demand that he and
his
colleagues identify their constituency,
the mass-base in whose name they speak, the movement whose ideals
and politics they represent. By Rustin's own admission, he and
his
colleagues have not built their coalition. Perhaps they speak for no
one but themselves, this band of arrogant but comfortable radicals
dedicated to exposing and exploding the folly of more youthful
activists' attempts? Is
this
not elitism? Is
it
not, to modify Rustin's
charge against the new activists, "a most unoriginal ... subjectivism?"
Rustin and his colleagues claim to represent the crucial tradition of
democratic socialism, but there has long been no socialist movement
in this country to buttress their representation. They claim commit–
ment to liberal democracy and opposition to totalitarianism, but
in
many specific cases, some of which Rustin knows well, and which
have been the subject of continuing controversy in the magazine on
whose staff he serves as Associate Editor, these social democrats have
attempted to smash significant protests against our increasingly illiberal
foreign and domestic policy, on the grounds of expediency or Com–
munist take-over. Speaking in no one's name, without any popular
