POINTS AFTER.
POST MORTEM
It's a frightening idea, but events seem to move faster than
we can think. They become memories before they are facts.
I had almost forgotten that only a few years ago I was flattered
and deeply disturbed when some of my more stylishly revolutionary stu–
dents told me in a patronizing tone of tolerance and respect that I was
the only one over thirty whom they trusted. (Naturally I wondered
how many other people they told this to.) To many of the embattled
young all of us who were not only over tIhirty but remembered the time
when history was supposed to make some sense were the enemy - not
the reactionaries, not those with real power, but
us,
those of
us
whose
only sin was to think that while the New Left might have some admirable
ideals it was politically crazy.
Now this phase is over, almost before it got started.
If
there is any
coilitinuity
in
the radical movement in this country, it is
in
the idea
that there is no continuity, in the fact that every new development is
a fresh start, having little to do with the past, as though it dropped by
parachute from the future.
I suspect it is still too early for any startling conclusions. But one
thing is clear: though certain diehards and sentimentalists refuse to let
go, the New Left is dead. And perhaps .the most useful thing we can do
at the moment is to ask why it was prematurely born and why it died
prematurely.
The New Left was born because the old left was dead. The old
left was either Stalinist or anti-Stalinist; and while the Stalinists ob–
viously were never more than a foreign growth in America, the anti–
Stalinists, some of whom turned right and others left, were in their own
way also too doctrinaire and factional. The New Left, on the other
hand, because it flaunted a break with the past, filled some people with
the hope that here at last was a radical movement that was fresh, free,
flexible, open to new ideas, and truly native. Unfortunately, its nativity
connected it to certain antiintellectual and crackpot currents strongly
rooted in homegrown traditions. Ironically, too, the seemingly free-wheel–
ing quality of the New Left, instead of freeing it from the constrictions
of the past, simply substituted a sectarian style for a sectarian program.
