408
MARSHALL BERMAN
our television sets, cars and clothes back to their rightful owners.
Africans, Peruvians, Vietnamese
will
move in and take over - mak.
ing every John Bircher's worst dreams come true. Indeed, said Gold,
in his last published words before his tragic death, "if it will take
fascism, we'll have to have fascism." Americans are so innately, ir–
reparably, radically evil, that "it will take fascism" - the twentieth
century's realest vision of hell on earth - to give us our just deserts.
And the handwriting on our palace walls is just as clear as the words
over the gate of the Inferno: all of us must abandon all hope for
ourselves.
When the Weatherpeople burst on the scene in the summer of
1969, their manifesto stirred a storm of bitter invective on the left.
What seemed most outrageous about them - even more than the
terrorist tactics they were to develop a few months later - was their
overwrought self-hatred, at once personal, racial and cultural. Critics
with a sense of irony were quick to pick up echoes of that old re–
liable "liberal guilt." But there were greater ironies which no one
was ready to confront. This guilt trip, sick as it was, struck a deeper
chord in a great many radicals' sensibilities than they cared to admit.
For the Weatherpeople were only working out, to its absurdly logical
conclusion, that idea of the American people as "one-dimensional"
which most American radicals had accepted uncritically for years.
By taking it seriously - dead seriously - the Weatherpeople made
it plain to
all
of us how cruel, how antihuman an idea it was. But
none of us on the left had a clear alternative.
If
the mass of the
American people, if "modern men" as a class, were not one-dimen–
sionally evil, exactly what were they - or, rather, what were we?
Everyone was embarrassed because no one could say. Hence the
critiques of Weathermen, as illuminating as they are, all have a
curiously hollow ring. There is an emptiness at the center, where an
idea should be. What's missing is a theory of the American people–
and more, a theory of "modern" people, of the men and women
whom highly developed societies create; a theory of the tensions and
contradictions in the life we live, of our strengths and limitations,
of our hidden capacities and potentialities.
To try
to
fill this vacuum, we must go back to the beginning
of the modern age. For the peculiar emptiness that afflicts the New
