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MARTIN B. DUBERMAN
organizing, "participatory" democracy, decentralized decision-making
and, on a personal level, to a freedom in dress, speech, sexual mores,
et al.,
which suggests a belief that ultimately salvation must come on an
individual basis.
Like the Anarchists before them, these young radicals care much
less about participating in the American Dream (a hope which in 1960
had been chief impetus for the Greensboro sit-ins) than about restructur–
ing it. They desire not further "progress," as this society currently defines
it in terms of greater efficiency and wealth, but rather, as George Wood–
cock has said of the Anarchists, "retreat along the lines of simplification."
They represent, again like the Anarchists, an ascetic, moralistic urge to
cultivate the virtues rather than to gratify the appetites, and they as–
sociate the virtues with poverty, with a rural "peasantry" and with those
declasse urban elements whose "anti-social" (even criminal) behavior
echoes
in
exaggerated form their own alienation. In all of this, the young
radicals of SNCC and SDS are far removed from the Marxists' stress on
economics, fear of the
lumpenproletariat,
distrust of cultural experi–
mentation-though many persist in claiming that the New Left already is
Marxist (the FBI-HUAC view) or should become Marxist (the Old
Left view).
As the New Left represented by SNCC and SDS shifts away from
faith in the federal government, it has begun to employ rhetoric tradi–
tionally associated with the Right: the supreme value of the individual,
the need to dismantle centralized authority, to resist bureaucratic inva–
sion and to develop self-help, self-reliance, self-respect. The Left has
begun to draw the equation long favored by the Right: that "centralism"
and dehumanization go hand in hand, or alternately, that individual
autonomy is a prerequisite for character. And this, ironically, at a time
when the Right itself has begun to vacate that position in response to
the growing partnership between big government and big business. Thus
the two ends of the political spectrum in this country have started to
converge-at least in terms of vocabulary,
if
not in terms of interests
or goals.
But the Anarchist tradition is not of equal relevance to the New Left
and to the traditional Right, except that it feeds their current distrust
-in one case burgeoning, in the other diminishing-of centralized power.
the Right has never been so much anti-authority, as simply anti- one
kind of authority-that associated with the federal government. To
the Right, authority has been bad when it emanates from Washing–
ton, but good when associated with the Church, the Law, the school–
room, the home, the Anglo-Saxon way. Far from being hostile to
