THE WEATHERVANE AND THE PENDULUM:
PART II
Leo Bersani
In his comments on the essays by Peter Brooks and myself
in the last issue of
PR,
William Phillips finds us guilty of "a suspension
of what is normally considered to be political thinking." I welcome the
discussion, but I find the charge more puzzling than damning.
The context in which Mr. Phillips uses the expressions "political
thinking," "political center" and "political identity" gives to these words
a precise content: they would apparently consist in more stringent crit–
icisms of the militant Left. Mr. Phillips is right in speaking of "con–
flicts" in my feelings about Hoffman and Rubin, but do conflicts dis–
qualify thinking from being political? I am, at any rate, far from recom–
mending that we "dissolve" ourselves "in some ideal radioalism, found
mostly in youth," and I had hoped to emphasize that if criticism con–
tinues to have any function at all, it must clearly refuse a mindless
identification with
any
rapturously embattled cause. It seems to me un–
just to oall my criticism of the most militant Left "minor" when I
speak, toward the end of my piece, of the tragically ahistorical dream o.f
those who would bomb us into. a community of love.
Nonetheless, Mr. Phillips is of course right about where the em–
phases fall in my essay, and indeed he makes me see more clearly than
befo.re how I feel about
priorities
in current political discussion and be–
havior. The stupidity of politically ineffectual violence on the Left is
that it diverts the energies of the nonviolent Left away from what I
take to be its primary task o.f opposition to. established inefficiency,
obscurantism and brutality. It redirects those energies to attacks against
the rare if indefensible brutality of isolated, politically desperate ex–
tremists. How will you distribute your political energies? I can imagine
no decent or effective consequences in America from the shooting o.f
policemen or the bombing of buildings. But if we even begin to suggest
that the violence which has been perpetrated within the United States
by the Left has been a threat to our society comparable either to the
violence we have committed in Southeast Asia or to the murder and
persecution of Blacks in America, then we should, at the very least,
be
willing to see our complicity with the Republican Party's order of prior–
ities in last fall's electoral campaign.
In periods of relative stability, "political identity" can be the same
thing as political affiliation. We are understandably nostalgic for such
comfortable equivalences. But many of us are now without affiliation.
Affiliations simplify commitments - both intellectually and morally–
and they also are the necessary condition for effective political action.
What are our chances now for translating commitments into affilia-
