THE STATE
'OF
THE UNION
THE LEFT YOUNG AND OLD
In America, politics
is
one of the strangest and most sig–
nificant of the new growth industries. It is the sector of the political
economy that has been able to absorb the threat of violence and
change. In the past ten years especially, new forms in political and
social manipulation and in consumer technology have been suggested
by the growth of a political subculture. There can be no doubt
that the cultural and political radicalism created by the New Left
and the Black Movements, as they brought underground music,
lan–
guage, personal styles and even political vision together, was in–
tended to be a confrontation with society.
Until now, however, such confrontations have been more sug–
gestive than destructive. New forms of political cultures have been
absorbed into old politics, like chemical preservatives added to
stale ideas, in a process natural to a society in which the impulse
to use
is
almost entirely subordinated to the impulse to consume.
The most striking characteristic of modern industrial society thm
appears to be the ability of established politics and high fashion to
absorb their most perceptive critics.
It
is
difficult to understand the origin, the present dilemma and
the future of the New Left without understanding the extent to
which the rest of society has tried to manipulate its development.
From its beginnings in the early sixties, the Movement has been
aware of how difficult
it
would be to preserve its integrity, how
im–
portant it was to struggle against the whole of American culture. It
has long discussed the danger of "co-optation." It has realized
that
absorption into the mainstream of American politics means the death
