PAUL HOLLANDER
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has been less frequently reflected in street demonstrations, uncom–
promising rhetoric, dramatic political gestures, or the colorful prolif–
eration of "alternative lifestyles." Thus, for example, the suggestions
of a leaflet circulated in 1968 - endorsed at the time by Tom Hayden
(who himself exemplifies the process of adopting a more circumspect
political demeanor while retaining the values of the 1960s)-are
clearly extreme by current standards: "Burn your money.... Break
down the family, church , nature, city, economy... . What is needed
is a generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy,
angry , irreligious , childish and mad. People who burn draft cards,
burn high school and college degrees, people who say 'to hell with
your goals!' People who ... redefine the normal. ... Burn your
houses down and you will be free."
Today many people who harbor strong negative feelings about
the prevailing social order work nonetheless "within the system" but
without any sense of allegiance towards it. Thus, for instance, it is
quite unlikely that Bernardine Dohrn, a former leader of the Weather
Underground, who recently joined a prestigious law firm in New
York, has significantly modified her views of "the Establishment" still
held when she surfaced from her underground life in 1980. At the
time , as reported in
The New Republic,
"She accused the U.S . of 'un–
speakable crimes' and said she still believed 'in the necessity of under–
ground work'." Likewise Staughton Lynd has switched from being a
more or less full-time antiwar activist and Viet Cong sympathizer to
the role of labor lawyer "helping workers in struggles with corpora–
tions and union leaders . His philosophy and confrontational tactics
have not changed," noted
The New York Times.
Nor, one may add,
has his sympathy towards Marxist-Leninist regimes changed . He
wrote in 1979: "I believe that Vietnamese communism, like Com–
munism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, has improved the life
of the majority . .. while repressing minorities ." He, as other social
critics of the same (1960s) generation, has retained the propensity to
give every benefit of doubt to countries or political movements locked
in conflict with the United States, having shifted his support from
the Viet Cong to Marxist Nicaragua.
A prominent characteristic of the social criticism that has flour–
ished since the 1960s and is still with us has been an incapacity–
willed or genuine - to discriminate between various types and degrees
of social evil or political-moral corruption. The polemical attribution
of fascism to the United States used to be typical of this approach.
More recently the temporary dispatch of American troops to Grenada
