ARGUMENTS
615
established opinion, the Right galvanizes its legions in its defense. On the
other hand, New Left organizations such as SDS and SNGG distrust
authority in a more inclusive way. They do not believe in
any
established
pieties-in thought, dress, speech patterns, art forms, social and sexual
behavior, politics, or even in stimulants (pot not booze). They are con–
scious rebels against all imposed patterns, established institutions, received
verities. SNCG and SDS are thus genuinely revolutionary: they see
almost nothing in the past-and certainly not in the present-admirable
enough to preserve. (The Right is prone to admire anything associated
with the past-or rather with the myths it has invented about the past.)
The New Left stands in direct descent from the Anarchists, who always
stressed, and not only rhetorically, the values of spontaneity, experimenta–
tion, "primitivism," individual style and free expression.
Though Anarchism and the New Left are separated by wide dif–
ferences, as, for example, the Left's reliance on politics, with its implied
acceptance of "organization" and "government," the Anarchists did
formulate some of the problems and did define many of the attitudes
which are once more prominent. Hence, in seeing how an earlier gen–
eration of radicals of roughly comparable temperament sought its an–
swers, today's New Left might better articulate its own. Yet to judge
from their formal writings, SNGG and SDS seem little aware of their
Anarchist forebears. Such an awareness will hardly provide today's radi–
cals with a definitive style or with ready-made solutions, but it could
lead them to clarifications and to further lines of inquiry.
Martin B. Duberman
