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movement and then black radicalism of the late 1960s-most importantly
the Black Panther Party-and with what we called "third-world national
liberation struggles," but lacked significant support in what had been the
Left's traditional base in the working class. (George Wallace's surprisingly
strong showing in the spring 1968 presidential primaries in Wisconsin,
including support in a resentment-laden, lower middle-class constituency,
appeared to confirm these perceptions and fears). Both Marcuse's argument
about the vanguard nature of rebellious youth and then notions of a "new
working class" being trained in the universities suggested that we-the stu–
dent left-were in the process of becoming a new revolutionary subject
replacing that of the irredeemably falsely conscious working classes.
The intellectual legacy of New Left Marxism gave us the sense that
we possessed the truth, that we were the representatives of Reason with a
capital "R" and Morality with a capital "M" and that as a result of this
extreme self-confidence those who disagreed with us were hopelessly mis–
taken or simply inunoral. Hence, as Marcuse argued in an influential essay
on "repressive tolerance," under certain circumstances radical political
change required that toleration be denied to those deemed racist, imperi–
alist or generally reactionary. From New Left theory but also from our
anger at both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations regarding civil
rights and especially the war in Vietnam, the New Left by the mid-1960s
had a well-developed antagonism to liberals (recall Phil Ochs, "Love Me
I'm a Liberal") and liberalism. Finally, I recall "anti-anticornn1Unism." We
argued that anti-communism was an effective tool of displacing anger onto
an external enemy but lacked substance in fact. To criticize conununism
sharply was to give aid and comfort to the powers that be. Different peo–
ple took this melange in different directions but when some of the
smartest-not only the dumbest-people in SDS joined Weatherman they
could rightly claim to have wound up there by pushing elements of New
Left thinking to a logical though evil and crazy direction. As a result, I have
thought then and since that the continuities before and after 1968 were as,
if not more, important than the breaks, and that the decade ought not be
divided into the good and the bad years with 1968 as the clear turning
point.
One of my fondest memories dates from 1966-1967 in Madison when
the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, or WDRU, was founded.
Encouraged by Stokley Carmichael's and, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Conunittee's (SNCC) urging to refuse induction, a small
group of, as I recall, less than twenty people signed and published the first
"We Won't Go" statement in
The Daily Cardinal
early in 1967. In April
1967, along with 120 other young men, I signed the second "We Won't
Go" statement. The statement declared:
