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highly intellectually inclined members of SDS. It is not true that the
SDS crack-up was primarily a revolt against the intellectuals. With–
out intellectuals, however dogmatic and crude they may have been,
the competing fanaticisms would never have come into being in the
first place.
There is no question but that the new left before 1968 was a far
more congenial place for people who loved to read and talk about
ideas than it was afterward. But illiberalism was such a prominent
part of the ideas we loved to discuss that we did not put up a very
good fight when totalitarian ideologues took over the movement. We
wanted community and equality rather than liberty and political
freedom. We took the latter for granted, or else we saw it as a sham.
It was not in spite but because of our utopianism that we were drawn
to political ideas hostile to a free society.
The new left from beginning to end saw itself as an intellectual
and political elite. Its end was an example of the arrogance of power,
rather than, as has often been stressed, the desperate rage of the
powerless. The new left was now going to "fight back." The NLF
would "win." The Panthers were "the vanguard of the revolution ."
"White youth in the belly of the monster" would join with "national
liberation struggles" to "smash U. S. imperialism." SDS would "open
up a front in the mother country." For liberals and many in the radi–
cal left, the new left's message of gloom about fascism and repression,
about police violence or the conduct of the war in Vietnam was de–
cisive. But it was the smell of success, moral absolutism, and the lure
of power mixed with the language of despair and frustration that I
recall most from those years. No wonder the factionalism was so bit–
ter: the prize was leadership of The Revolution.
When this moral and political elite saw that its judgements about
Vietnam turned out to be wrong, it responded as most people do
when faced with a difficult past: repression and silence. The course
of events in Indochina after 1975 transformed the new left from a
badge of honor to be worn on all occasions to an embarrassment . The
truth is that we did not predict what the Vietnamese Communists
would do with their victory, even though there was no dearth of well–
grounded opinion in the United States that correctly foresaw the cat–
astrophic consequences of a Communist victory . We chose not to be–
lieve those voices. We were wrong and they were right. Those who
actively opposed the war
and
were aware of how horrible a Commu–
nist victory could be for the people of Indochina were a minority.
Such cognitive dissonance was beyond the capacity of most of us.
