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and biting essay, "New Styles in Leftism," Howe hit fiercely at the new
currents of authoritarian leftism that soon would get the name "radical
chic." Here he took on those who abided by the "heritage" of Stalinism
which still existed, for those who endorsed the cult ofMao and Fidel, and
those who thought that the "wish to shock" was a new form of social
revolution.
For these thoughts Howe became anathema to the New Left. At a
now-famous meeting in one of those old Workman's Circle lecture halls,
Howe debated Tom Hayden, then the young leader of Students for a
Democratic Society, author of the Port Huron Statement (the early New
Left's manifesto), and spokesman for those who rejected anti–
Communism, as Hayden and Staughton Lynd then put it, as "the equiva–
lent of rape. " While Howe made his points, Hayden turned pale and
stormed out of the hall, indicating by his action that a major rupture had
taken place; that the breaking of the tie between the old socialists and the
emerging young movement was now complete. For Howe, Tom Hayden
and his supporters lacked "historical sense." He was right, and they would
never forgive him for the espousal of his principles and for the firmness
with which he enunciated them.
Years later, Howe would write that perhaps he had "overreacted,
becoming at times harsh and strident," that perhaps he did not have to act
in
such a contentious fashion towards the New Left. But Howe was right
then, and his criticism of the New Left holds up , twenty-five years after
the short life span of the movement. And this , indeed, brings me to the
path taken by Howe during the last fifteen years of his life. An opponent
of Reaganism, he became bitter about what he saw as the new greed
prevailing in our culture, and this became somewhat of an obsession.
Howe could never resist taking a potshot at the hated neoconservatives,
his former comrades who had drifted away from their roots to embrace
the new conservative mood. To be fair, they were not too kind to him,
either. Writing in
The New Criterion,
Hilton Kramer chastized Howe for
clinging to the dream of a socialist project whose time had passed. After
all,
in Howe's own publication, Robert Heilbroner had acknowledged
that it was economic thinkers of the right, Hayek and Von Mises in par–
ticular, who had proved more prescient about socialism than any of the
left had. And Marxist historians like Eugene Genovese had written - in
the journal Howe had come to disdain most,
Commentary
-
that socialism
had finally "met its Waterloo"; rather than face the meaning of this suc–
cessful counterrevolution, Genovese wrote, its adherents preferred "to
happily dwell on the evil legacy ofRonald Reagan."
That was precisely the path and tone adopted by Howe from the
