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tion to talk compete with the inspirational value of the Birchers'
lurid fantasies?
The liberal strategy works best where it is superfluous. The teleo–
logy of discussion is compromise. Talk is effective when those talk–
ing share enough assumptions so that disagreements can
be
resolved
within a field of agreement. The enormous agitation about the young
today is justified only to the extent that they no longer exist within
that field. Otherwise, there is really very little to worry about (or
hope for . . .), no matter how violent the rhetoric of youth may
be. The very willingness to listen on the part of the young invites us
to relax in the midst of the sweaty, angry debate: we are all on
the same team.
It's of course very difficult
not
to be on the team. The forms
of co-option are numberless, and affect even those who, like Dotson
Rader, have courageously protested with more than their signature.
Compare Rubin's
Do It!
to Rader's
I Ain't Marchin' Anymore.
The
latter's admirably lucid book may have worried some of his Colum–
bia professors, but I don't see how any of them could help being
proud of it. His portraits of New Left leaders are incisive; he subtly
disengages the psychological appeal of violence (and the social com–
pulsion toward it) from its political effectiveness; and, most irresisti–
bly, he is both intense and ironic about his own involvement in the
events at Columbia. He
explains himself
and his friends to us, and
the disruptive nature of the demonstrations in which Rader has taken
part
is,
in
his
book, subordinated to the reflective, introspective mood
in which he now relates himself to them.
I Ain't M archin' Anymore
is full of angry and moving protest, but the protest is part of a
meditation, a remembrance of things past. In
Do It!,
the past
is
not
an object of complex, "honest" analysis;
it
is a simplified scenario of
future possibilities. Rader unmasks the symbolic nature of his
be–
havior, while Rubin celebrates it.
As Rader's book illustrates, the sociologist's "procedural norm"
of objective detachment easily becomes our culture's most effective
intellectual device for preventing us from being detached from that
culture. Rader's recent Feuerlike probing (in
Evergreen Review)
into
the sexual identity problems of the Weathermen
is
only mildly sur–
prising, given the analytical distance he first of all took from him–
self in
I Ain't Marchin' Anymore.
His self-mockery has, to
be
sure, a
