THE WEATHERVANE AND THE PENDULUM
The pieces by Leo Bersani and Peter Brooks in this issue are
quite impressive. Bersani's is extremely sophisticated
~n
its handling of
critical ideas, and Brooks's is very effective in its candor and open–
mindedness, and its sensitivity ,to the tone of events. One must admire
both as writers and agree with much they say, particularly with their
criticism of those who use what is wrong with the New Left to justify
stand-pat views. But because their pieces raise some vital political ques-
tions so clearly and on so high a level, they provide a polemical oc-
...
casion for arguing about them.
It
should be emphasized that the debate
is not primarily with either Brooks or Bersani, though it has been con–
venient to use their remarks to get at the issues themselves.
Behind both pieces are certain assumptions common
to
many liberals
and radicals today. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it might be said that
both pieces seem to assume, as Trotsky once said, precisely that which
has to
be
proven, and that both pieces lack a political center, a political
identity.
In
this respect, they are like weathervanes pointing the way
the wind blows but lacking a position of their own. For both Bersani
and Brooks assume that Hoffman and Rubin and the Panthers - and
by implication all the most militant and violent figures and groups on
the Left - represent in some absolute, unquestionable way
"The Revolu–
tion"
and
"The New Society."
Hence Brooks's and Bersani's concern is
not so much to evaluate the new politics as to appreciate it. There is some
criticism, but it is minor, as when Bersani questions whether it makes
political sense for Hoffman to try to live up to what he calls the fantasy
of the Right about the Left, or when Brooks observes the similarity
between the free-floating radical schemes cropping up in New Haven
and those described by Flaubert in 1848. And while Bersani pulls back
at the end of his piece from his earlier enthusiasm for Hoffman and
Rubin, he doesn't resolve the conflicts in his attitude toward them.
On the whole, Bersani's and Brooks's articles reflect many prevailing
"revolutionary" attitudes. For example, Bersani tends to put down the
entire liberal tradition and he echoes the currently fashionable idea of the
"complicity of liberal capitalism with fascism," reminiscent of the theory
of "social fascism" popular in the thirties - an ironic throwback to the
old politics by the intransigents of the new politics. And Brooks suggests
throughout his piece that he is uneasy with and ashamed of his own
liberal impulses. Brooks also talks of taking sides, as though there were
only two: the side of the Panthers and the side of the ineffectual,
timid, pusillanimous liberals. Actually, he takes the Panther posture at
face value: when he says that the guilt or innocence of the defendants
has nothing to do with the real issue; when he talks about the Panthers'
coercive tactics, explaining that they are part of the Blacks' and our own
"existential condition"; and when he simplifies the rather complex ques-
tion of the role of the university, citing the Panther who said the revolu-
tion needs the university and the university is in the revolution. Similarly,
Bersani dismisses Roszak as having no taste for "militancy" and "disrup–
tion," as though it were self-evident that such a taste was the key to
