Former leaders and members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) have written a relatively short appeal to today's youth--well, mostly youth--who supported Bernie Sanders' latest and likely last presidential campaign, but who are not on board the Biden/DNC Train. The Nation published this appeal, and I reprint it for those who lack a subscription, such as me (I received the appeal through a cut-and-paste from an activist affiliated with the Albuquerque chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who I thank):
An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left
Now it is time for all those who yearn for a more equal and just social order to face facts.
By Former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.…
“…[L]ay your shoulders to the wheel; … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but “show your faith by your works…”
—Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
On April 13, 2020, Senator Bernie Sanders urged his supporters to vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden. Writing as founders and veterans of the leading New Left organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society, we welcome Bernie’s wise choice—but we are gravely concerned that some of his supporters, including the leadership of Democratic Socialists of America, refuse to support Biden, whom they see as a representative of Wall Street capital. Some of us are DSA members, but do not believe their position is consistent with a long-range vision of democracy, justice, and human survival.
Now it is time for all those who yearn for a more equal and just social order to face facts. All of us have charged for years that Trump is the leader of an authoritarian party that aims for absolute power; rejects climate science; embraces racism, sexism, homophobia, and violence; holds the democratic process in contempt; bids to take over the entire federal judiciary; represses voting rights; and violates plain human decency on many fronts. These are the grounds for our solemn determination: a common effort to unseat him is our high moral and political responsibility.
In our time, we fought—for a time successfully—against the sectarian politics of the Cold War. We were mindful then of the cataclysm that befell German democracy when socialists and communists fought each other—to death—as Hitler snuck by and then murdered them all.
Now we fear that some on the left cannot see the difference between a capitalist democrat and a protofascist. We hope none of us learn this difference from jail cells.
We have dedicated much of our lives to the fight to extend democracy to more people, more institutions, more places. We continue this work in diverse ways motivated now as then by a spirit of community and solidarity. But now the very existence of American democracy is in jeopardy.
Some of us think “endorsing” Joe Biden is a step too far; but we who now write this open letter all know that we must work hard to elect him. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.
In 1919, in the midst of the brief German socialist revolution, the great sociologist Max Weber addressed left-wing students about politics. He urged upon them that the best politics must be painfully aware of the consequences of action, not just intentions. Speaking to young men, he prophetically warned them that the cost of ignoring consequences might be their deaths.
We salute Bernie Sanders and our friends and comrades in DSA and in the diverse movements for social justice and environmental sanity that enabled them to rise. We look forward to joining together to build on and defend our accomplishments. And now we plead with all: Get together, beat Trump, and fight for democracy—precious, fragile, worth keeping.
The signers of this letter were founders, officers, and activists in Students for a Democratic Society between 1960 and 1969. Interested persons may contact Robert Ross at rjsross@clarku.edu for further information.
MF Blog, the Sequel note: Signers of this appeal include people I deeply respect, such as Barry Bluestone, and one I used to find too radical, but, who, much later, I have come to personally know and adore, meaning Mark Rudd. It also includes someone I used to admire without reservation, and I think I still like a lot, meaning Todd Gitlin--who I only personally know indirectly.
MF Blog, the Sequel note: Signers of this appeal include people I deeply respect, such as Barry Bluestone, and one I used to find too radical, but, who, much later, I have come to personally know and adore, meaning Mark Rudd. It also includes someone I used to admire without reservation, and I think I still like a lot, meaning Todd Gitlin--who I only personally know indirectly.
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The Old Left of the 1930s lectures the 1960s New Leftists to remain inside the Democratic Party
What I want to write a long blog post about is how much the SDS alumni appeal is reminiscent of how too many Old Left (1930s through 1950s) radicals behaved toward these same student radicals during the late 1960s--as the War Against Vietnam raged on, the cities had been exploding with racially-based riots, and young women were beginning to free themselves from the chains of patriarchy; and where corporate America had been bankrolling Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Wilson Reagan, and other politicians, who would eventually roll back the gains from the New Deal and Great Society programs of the 1960s. And how the leaders in the Democratic Party decided to embrace the corporations instead of protecting its union base.
What follows then is a history lesson, because to understand what I mean about my criticism of these now old former Sixties radicals, one has to not only know about the battles these people fought, often heroically, against the establishment in the 1960s. One has to also understand where those elders, radicals of the 1930s, were coming from, and why they were so concerned. Both sets of youthful radicals failed in their grandiose goals. However, both generally and positively moved history's needle, and, most importantly, both were fundamentally right about the big issues facing our nation in their respective times. Yes, each also fell into dogmatic stands, while proclaiming hope, and some, sadly, proclaiming fealty to, foreign governments or foreign revolutionaries, which doomed each radical generation to easy dismissal and demonization in the then-capitalist owned press, and later corporate broadcast media. But let's not get ahead of ourselves as to whose fault that really was. The best book on the Old Left 1930s student movement remains Robert Cohen's When the Old Left was Young, if one is interested in learning more about the 1930s student movements.
We will also review, as emblematic of the attacks from the Old Left of the 1930s on the New Left of the 1960s, an intellectual food fight between two Old Leftists, published in 1967 in the pages of the New York Review of Books (NYRB): Irving Howe and Philip Rahv. Howe is rightly revered, even among Todd Gitlin and other former 1960s radicals, as the editor of the once-great journal, Dissent, which I used to subscribe to, and eagerly read, from the late 1970s through mid-1990s. Rahv was a former radical activist and writer from the 1930s and 1940s, but who was someone almost completely unknown to most student radicals of the 1960s (though the ones who later became academics learned much more about Rahv, too). In discussing this Old Left intellectuals' food fight regarding the 1960s radical students, we will see Howe behaving as a lecturing-hectoring parent against his spiritual and intellectual activist children, and Rahv, twelve years older than Howe, acting as a detached, but cool grandpa, having more sympathy, and willing to be deferential, to that same youth. In Howe's "radical" days of the 1930s, he had been a Trotskyist, and disdainful of FDR's New Deal, which Trotskyists mostly deemed to have an odor of fascism, and which they deemed insufficiently radical for the moment. These 1930s American Trotskyists mostly refused to take part in agitating for the New Deal legislation, unlike, most ironically, the American Stalinists, who worked hard with New Deal liberals on legislation and agitation during the period known as the Popular Front (1935-1939). That the Stalinists were willing to submerge their Communist beliefs for the New Deal always made me more sympathetic to those Reds than the Trotskyists, who largely sat on the sidelines, while admittedly writing more insightful analyses of the Stalinist genocidal terrors, and Stalinist betrayals in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). However, it was the Stalinists who helped New Deal liberals lick the envelopes, canvass, agitate, and get out the vote for policies FDR and his administration, and Congresspeople were proposing, and passing.
Unlike the Trotskyist Howe, Philip Rahv had been, during the Great Depression 1930s decade, a full-on Stalinist--until 1937, when he broke with the Party over the anti-Bolshevik purges and show trials Stalin initiated. Rahv, under the auspices of the Communist Party, had founded and edited the highly praised literary-political journal, the Partisan Review (PR). The PR was, in many ways, the precursor to the aforementioned New York Review of Books, and was, most ironically, an intellectual successor to the first truly and original (and non-left oriented) literary-political intellectual American journal, the North American Review. The PR's most profoundly important period came in that period from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, when, as a still-left, but anti-Communist, journal, it courageously published European exiles from Communism who nonetheless retained a belief in socialist aesthetics and values. This included Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and my most revered Soviet dissident, Victor Serge. The PR for that period provides any modern reader with a treasure trove of brilliant insight of politics, literature, art, and not as often, economics. If the PR was not as strong on detailed economic analyses, it was because it was assumed you had already read Marx, Keynes, Veblen, and other famous economists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
The Howe-Rahv argument was published in the NYRB on November 23, 1967. The War Against Vietnam was still raging, with half a million American troops (mostly young men) serving in an increasingly frustrating, yet brutally prosecuted war against peasants in a far off place hardly any Americans could name before 1964. In November 1967, the nation had gone through a year of the most deadly and frequent racial riots in major, and not so major, cities--which prompted fear, anger, and frustration at different levels for whites and blacks in the US (Latinos were a smaller minority at the time in most places in the US, and Asians hardly a factor at all). The student movement was becoming radicalized, as the students' parents, and some grandparents, metaphorically and physically attacked, demeaned, and otherwise contemptuously ignored these students---when the students were fundamentally right that the War Against Vietnam was wrong and should stop, and how there was a need for economic and social, not merely legal, equality among races and ethnicities. Plus, 1967 saw the growth of the Black Power movement, which really scared white America, including right wing politicians in California, who passed the most strict gun control legislation to stop young black men from freely carrying guns to protect themselves against white racist police authority.
Earlier in 1967, on, most ominously, April 4, a year to the day before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered perhaps his most radical speech, where Dr. King connected the dots between the War Against Vietnam, systemic economic inequality, and race relations--just what the most articulate then-young SDSers were saying. It is not the speech most people trot out every January for MLK, Jr. Day because Dr. King's speech is more radical than any speech Bernie Sanders has delivered in over 40 years. As most of us know, a year later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King would be assassinated while trying to assist largely black striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, as part of his organizing the Poor People's March. That march was designed to bring the races together on economic issues, in a time when the white race electoral backlash had already begun. In the haze of this now-distant past, it so easy to forget how much white America vilified and hated Dr. King--to a point where most liberal political leaders had, by 1967, shied away from Dr. King for his becoming too radical. Dr. King's essential reply to such people was what the late liberal-left US Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, much later said, "Sometimes, the dreamers are the only realists." As we read Dr. King's actual speech, we see how true that aphorism applied to the speech and Dr. King's plans.
As I say, though, this Old Left intellectuals' food fight occurs in November 1967, which is before anyone knew the incumbent and seemingly all powerful President Lyndon Johnson would declare, on March 31, 1968, he would not seek re-election--after having been elected president in 1964 by a landslide. This intellectuals' food fight occurs before King's assassination in April 1968 and before Robert F. Kennedy's assassination two months later, in June 1968, just as RFK was gaining popular momentum over the other peace candidate, US Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy--an aloof, non-passionate politician who liked being a poet more than a statesman. As historians of the period know, the Democratic Party's powers-that-be, in a time when primaries were still relatively new, and where previous presidential selections occurred in back rooms, with big-wig donors and power players with arm-twisting of compliant delegates, were reluctantly, but firmly, pushing the befuddled Vice President, and former Cold Warrior, pro-civil rights Senator, Hubert H. Humphrey. Humphrey waited almost a month after Johnson's withdrawal to declare his candidacy, and, immediately, Humphrey became the candidate those power Democrats' wanted precisely because he was compliant in the face of their power, and continued to refuse to publicly speak out against a war he knew--and I mean, he knew--was wrong, and who had never shown any mettle to stand up to the establishment of which he was ultimately a part--except perhaps in his powerful pro-civil rights speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1948 against the southern white racist Democrats, which Democrats continued to exert significant control in the party until the dawn of the 1970s.*
In the Democratic Party's ensuing August 1968 national convention, which occurred within a backdrop of protests outside (and sometimes inside) the convention halls, which protests turned into mayhem and rioting, with at least a minority of police officers behaving in a way that an official report summary termed a "police riot," Humphrey secured the nomination. As a kick-in-the-face to the peace movement in the party, Humphrey picked go-along lackluster liberal from Maine, US Senator Ed Muskie as the vice-presidential candidate. Muskie had been pro-war until a trip to Vietnam in late 1967, and had only privately written President Johnson in early 1968 to stop the bombing, and seek a negotiated settlement. Nonetheless, Muskie had, as part of a commission, approved the South Vietnamese elections in 1967, which election excluded anyone advocating co-existence with or legitimizing the National Liberation Front (NLF)). Anyone who believes Muskie or Humphrey would have stood up to the Republican Party and pro-war Democrats to end the Vietnam War, without a backlash of Ronald Reagan becoming president in 1972 needs a lesson in historical patterns and trends. In fact, if one analyzes the entire Humphrey-Muskie campaign from August to November 1968, one sees it was more based on trying not to lose, rather than pushing to win.**
So let's dig into this emblematic intellectual food fight between two Old Left veterans, with Howe, 47 years old at the time, and Rahv, a sprightly, yet wizened, 59 years of age. It may seem strange to focus on this single letters exchange. However, the exchange captures well the spirit of the moment, and the echoes within the SDS alumni's appeal published this week. The food fight began with Rahv's essay-review of two books: One book was from the now late Carl Ogelsby, a 1960s student radical and former SDS president, who ended his days isolated from most of his old allies, forever playing in conspiracy theories (some valid, more not), and believing there could be some left-right, multi-racial populism to save America from itself (And yes, I understand those dreams of a populist coalition quite well). The book Rahv was reviewing, which Ogelsby co-wrote with another leftist writer, was a first glimpse of a call for that never-happened coalition. The other book Rahv reviewed was one of essays from Old Left writers entitled The Radical Imagination, which book Howe had edited, with my American intellectual hero, Michael Harrington, writing the introductory essay. Sadly, Howe's edited book contained multiple examples of lecturing, and sometimes outright attacking, the student, African-American, Latino, and other radicals and movements, loosely called the New Left, for not being sufficiently patient, refusing to recognize constrictions within American society, and, thinking there was any effective political life outside the Democratic Party. Rahv's essay-review is unfortunately behind the subscription wall, but please take it as an assumption that Rahv was critical, but not terribly so, regarding Howe and Harrington, and saw the merits of their positions vis-a-vis the New Left. However, he was also acting the role of a kindly grandfather, essentially saying, in an Old Left way, the kids are alright, and that maybe the nation was in a propitious moment we had not seen since the Great Depression years of the 1930s in terms of radical ideas and movements floating through our land.
Rahv's essay drew a reply from Howe that was heated, and, frankly petty, in various parts. In Howe's reply, however, he wrote an elegant plea for the 1960s young activists to remain in a larger coalition inside the Democratic Party's tent, in a manner similar to the point our aged SDSers today are saying:
But limited coalitions remain possible and urgent. If the (right-wing militarist and racist George) Meany-type unions campaign, as they have, for a two-dollar minimum wage, I cooperate with them. When they support the war, I part company. If (liberal Cold Warrior Walter) Reuther proposes, as he has, an end to bombing North Vietnam, I will work with him for that end. When he endorses LBJ for reelection, I go my own way. All this is ABC, something the radical movement, even in its most sectarian moments, has always understood—that is, until Rahv and Oglesby, aflutter for their virtue, warned us that there are dangers of being “co-opted” by Reform Democrats. But dear friends: you who doubt your capacity to withstand the lures (such as they are) of Reform Democrats, you are going to make a revolution? (NOTE: MF Blog, the Sequel provided the first names and qualifiers, not Rahv; but Rahv provided the last parenthetical phrase.)
Rahv's rejoinder to Howe's reply was one of genuine surprise, and one where Rahv somewhat sadly winced at the vitriol from his somewhat younger fellow left-wing anti-Communist intellectual. In Rahv's rejoinder to Howe, Rahv specifically responded to Howe's point about coalitions:
He (Howe) writes: “If the Meany-type unions campaign…for the $2 minimum wage, I co-operate with them. When they support the war, I part company. If Reuther proposes, as he has, an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, I will work with him for that end.” Here he (Howe) is speaking of individual support, not any kind of coalitionism. And what makes Howe assume that either Meany or Reuther is in the slightest degree interested in his support or non-support? I hope he is not so deluded as to imagine that the tiny group around Dissent, numbering not much more than a dozen people or so, constitute some kind of Social Democratic party that has to be reckoned with by the powers that be. It is one thing for Willy Brandt and Herbert Wehner to enter Herr Kiesinger’s cabinet in Bonn (not that I admire this latest exhibition of Minister-Sozialismus). After all, the party they lead does represent considerable power at the polls. But for an inconsequential group of political-minded intellectuals, who are by no means activists, to set itself up as the mentor and guide of the entire Left is an exercise in sheer illusionism.
This is a devastating reply because Rahv is saying, Sorry, Irving, you and I no longer count--if we ever did. The kids are the activists knocking on doors, canvassing campuses and beyond, going into poor urban neighborhoods (as Tom Hayden did in Newark, and who ended up writing the best single book on the Newark riots, which Hayden called A Rebellion in Newark), and planning and participating in mass protests. The kids are the ones on the front lines, Irving. The kids are the ones dreading the draft notice to ship out to a war they know, and many adults know (but won't speak up or out), is morally wrong. Really, Irving. Who are you, in middle age, to give these kids a lecture against seizing a moment when cities have been exploding in riots or rebellions, the war halfway around the world is going stronger than ever, despite these kids' relatively respectful and friendly teach-ins back in 1965, and how people in power--in our age range--are calling in the cops to beat up and stomp on these kids? And then, to add insult to injury, the kids are lied about in the capitalist press--and we don't lift a finger in our journals or op-eds to defend them. Worst of all, most politicians in the Democratic Party--other than Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, and a few others--not only don't listen to these young people, they hold them in contempt as troublemakers and bums. Cue the Alan King joke: "These kids today! They have these bands with the craziest names! You know, like the Animals. Yeah, they look like animals, and smell like them, too." Always big laughs on the Ed Sullivan show, ya know?
Howe's timing in this attack on the youthful radicals was prescient as to what happened in 1968, with Nixon's razor thin victory margin over Humphrey, and some unknown number of radical activists who did not vote for Humphrey. However, one wonders if those relatively activists over age 21 (the age limit to vote) not voting for "the Hump" made any actual difference. See here where Todd Gitlin and others argue over the 1968 election, and who is responsible. What one gets from reading the link is Gitlin and the others can't really say one way or the other whether their not voting for Humphrey made a difference, but one thing is clear: The white backlash was on its way to national prominence, and power.***
Nonetheless, Howe's attack in November 1967 was pathetically wrong at the time because, at the very moment he was engaged in this intellectuals' food fight in a limited-circulation intellectual journal, many young student radicals were actively seeking to recruit a peace candidate to challenge President Johnson in the 1968 primaries. Some, such as Tom Hayden and others (especially movement gadfly, but very influential, Allard Lowenstein) were in active talks with RFK to be the candidate. However, RFK reluctantly declined, recognized his becoming the candidate at that moment would only look like a personal fight with the man he hated (and who hated him), President Johnson. This book's title is all you need to know about that relationship for purposes of this blog post why RFK was right to decline in November 1967. These young activists then recruited US Senator Eugene "Gene" McCarthy, and, thereafter, most student radicals decided to go "Clean for Gene," and then, after McCarthy showed he could be viable after the New Hampshire primary in late February 1968, RFK declared his candidacy, other young activists became "Clean for Bobby" as RFK realized he could run without his candidacy being seen as a mere personal vendetta against President Johnson. Therefore, contrary to Howe, most of the most important young activists were trying to stay within, and work with, the system. The number of Youth International Movement (Yippies) members was always a subset within a subset, and less influential than what Rahv sardonically recognized, in his rejoinder, as the limited influence of aging intellectuals, such as him and Howe.
Rahv's plea on behalf of the student radicals was less succinct, and most importantly, for posterity or historical analysis, less eloquent than, I.F. Stone's later May 19, 1969 short essay, In Defense of the Campus Rebels, but Stone said essentially the same thing about why the student rebels needed the older generation's defense, not derision. Stone wrote at one point in his essay, before and after reminding the young rebels of the type of things Howe was so exercised about---including Stone saying he didn't like four-letter words in articles or speeches, and rejecting revolutionary dogma from foreign dictatorial governments:
The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican and the Indian from injustice. This is the business of our best youth. However confused and chaotic their unwillingness to submit any longer is our best hope.
Note Stone's last three words: "our best hope." Stone and Rahv were born six months apart, Stone in December 1907, and Rahv in June 1908, but both over a decade older than Howe. It is much like how Bernie Sanders speaks much more genuinely to young people today, though Bernie was born in December 1941, just over five years before the first year of the Baby Boom, 1946. Yet, the two Old Left men, Rahv and Stone, understood better than these Boomer activists' parents, the young's impatience, rage, and frustration--and two older men respected the younger activists' intellectual abilities, no matter how sardonically stated, or yelled, and no matter whether they really knew anything about the old men's seemingly ancient battles (which most didn't). Young activists had already amended Jack Weinberg's famous/infamous 1964 taunt, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," to "Don't trust anyone over thirty--except I.F. Stone." As I said, Rahv was largely unknown to these young activists, but Rahv had been a hovering presence over the intellectual radicals of the 1930s and 1940s. In my view, Stone and Rahv had better parental skills with regard to the young radicals, and more sympathy for their frustrations with the stupid, venal, mean, and racist politics that permeated Cold War American culture. Stone and Rahv saw the need for apologies, not lectures, to these young, intelligent, passionate young people.
Why the now aged New Left sounds like the Old Left when lecturing the young activists today
I chose the Howe-Rahv exchange from 1967 because, to go into the writings of the young activists at the time against the likes of Howe and Harrington would be to see little more than a pre-historic variant of "Ok, Boomer"--in this instance, "Ok, dinosaurs." One of the now old SDS signers, Todd Gitlin, has become a highly respected history professor, who, in turn, wrote a great book on the Sixties (see the link to Gitlin above), and dealt with Howe in various places in the book, mostly giving Howe his due (see page 173 of Gitlin's book for an example). I am, however, less interested in the younger radicals' derisive response to Howe and Harrington, during the 1960s, as much as Howe's and sometimes Harrington's derisive attacks, when they should have been better parents.
Here is perhaps one of the most egregious examples on Howe's part. At page 272 of James Millers' Democracy is in the Streets, Howe was quoted providing Howe's still early impressions of the now deceased, and legendary student radical, Tom Hayden. Howe claimed Hayden had an "obscure personal rage" who also had the "beginnings of a commissar." This is horribly and nastily wrong on two counts. First, Hayden had no "obscure personal rage." Hayden was clear and specific about the American war machine destroying Southeast Asia, and, by 1967, Hayden had already been beaten up by authorities for being correct about the wrongness of a foreign war, and ridiculed for telling the truth about the Newark riots. Hayden fully connected the dots in Dr. King's radical April 4, 1967 speech, something Howe barely acknowledged except to say, in essence, "But we have to keep supporting the Democratic Party." The second part of Howe's observation is just pure red-baiting from someone who should have known better. When Phil Ochs sang, "I know that you were younger once/'Cause you sure are older now," he meant people precisely like Irving Howe. And let's be clear: Anyone reading the life of Tom Hayden knows he was anything but a commissar, and, ironically, was attacked more from the more radical left than the center or the right throughout much of his later political life. This is why, whenever I mention the name Irving Howe to any Sixties student activist, even today, they rage, or say something akin to a spit, and curse Howe's name.**** For those left radicals who were upset with Hayden in the late 1960s for not going far enough toward revolution, they now tear up at the mention of Hayden's name, as they should.
For me, as an elementary school student during the Sixties, and who was never part of those Old Left-New Left arguments, I admired Howe as reached his even older age. In the late 1970s and up till the mid-1990s, I subscribed to Howe's magazine, Dissent, and, during those years, I found the journal brilliant and insightful about important public policies facing our nation, with often wise historical perspectives. Dissent published many essays and articles, during that time, which contained detailed policy information and analysis which were better than most other journals of their kind.
I hope I have captured the emotions in the moment of the late 1960s, and provided some perspective for those who were intellectuals, activists and radicals of the 1930s, and their reactions to the 1960s New Left. I hope this also explains the irony in seeing how much these aging SDSers may be less strident in their appeal than Irving Howe (and other Old Leftists), but are still lecturing and shaming the young 2020 activists.
We are bad parents and grandparents, just as bad as the parents and grandparents of the 1960s radicals were:
The parents and grandparents of the 1960s student radicals were wrong to lecture and hector their children and grandchildren, particularly because those student radicals were fundamentally right about the two most important issues of that decade, which were the war machine murdering peasants in Vietnam and the importance of achieving racial/ethnic economic and social equality, above and beyond equality by statute and court decision. Today's young people are also fundamentally correct about the four existential issues of our time: (1) climate chaos, (2) systemic economic inequality, (3) deprivation of medical care under a byzantine, money-driven insurance system, and (4) student debt which cripples the ability of young people to accumulate capital, as in the previous three or four generations, and instead stuck in servicing debt (Yet, somehow we want our kids and grandkids to fund our Social Security and Medicare).
Now, let's go back and re-read the appeal. See its focus on Trump, and how it reads as if Rachel Maddow, over at MSNBC, dictated it. It doesn't speak to the truth about the four existential issues (focusing more on cultural issues), nor does it acknowledge Trump as the result of those issues, and Democratic Party leadership priorities, as opposed to Trump merely being the cause of them. It speaks to restoring the Obama leadership more than it does to making for a much better future.
Most importantly, in trying to listen to both the aging SDSers and the young people, I think we need to acknowledge the gorilla in the room:
One's position about the need to vote for Biden, or whatever DNC controlled candidate is chosen at this August's national convention, depends upon where we are economically at the moment in this rotted and frayed society.
If we are even relatively comfortable, we see the existential danger of Trump to what remains of the Republic. We most ardently and strongly want to avoid the calamity of a second Trump administration and a Republican senate, which will, first off, complete the destruction of any integrity left in the judiciary (and, yes, I know the judiciary is a political place, as best explained in Fred Rodell's still amazing and timely book, Nine Men (1955)), the continued acceleration of climate chaos through reckless pro-fossil fuel policies, and the potential Trump will want to finally try to enact martial law--with that compliant judiciary--leaving us with a feint hope a professional military will intercede and stop Trump, a belief David Brin, the astrophysicist, pro-military, sci-fi writer, and sometimes libertarian, has intimated from time to time. Either way, we look like the Banana Republic we have been moving toward for a long time.
Now, let's look at the current situation from the Millennial/Gen-Z standpoint. The young people under 40 are suffering under student debt, have little or no medical insurance, face no stable job prospects, and are afraid to even get married or have children. They have far less to lose than we do in our relatively more comfortable lives. Through their lives' lens, these younger people do no see as much upside from Biden's ascension to the presidency, since most of Biden's most important votes, in his "bi-partisanship" and "consensus" politics, have led to the existential crises they face more than we face as Boomers and Oldsters.
There is one related difference between now and the 1960s. In the 1960s, there was no belief among the young white student radicals that they would be losing their economic status as part of a rising middle and upper middle class. There was no belief among many (not all by any means) black and Latino radicals that schools would become more segregated over time, and with more violence within their daily lives, and how the law-and-order rhetoric which began in earnest in 1966 and 1967, would end up with mass incarceration occurring over decades. White parents in union neighborhoods and industrial centers never believed unions would be almost completely rolled back, so that Republican votes seemed reasonably safe to "own those (n-word) lovers" and "ungrateful student bums." Most Americans still don't notice enough to be angry over the fact social mobility has declined, which has most adversely affected these same Millennials and Gen-Zers. That, again, speaks to the young people perceiving they have as much to lose with Biden, who is part of the reason they face what they face today, as with Trump.
My own willingness to likely vote for Biden, or the DNC alternative nominee, in case Biden's inevitable stroke happens, admittedly speaks to my own relative economic comfort as an aging, white, suburban Boomer. The young people who have been activists for Bernie Sanders, who I loudly supported, are speaking from their lack of comfort. These young people were betrayed in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. They grew up believing in Obama's 2008 campaign promise, but now understand the level of Obama's betrayal, which was Obama's promise to be a transformative president, only to serve as a neo-liberal/corporatist reaction-oriented president. If someone has not read Ken Silverstein's Barack Obama, Inc. from the 2006 Harpers, they have no reason to start a fight with me over my one-line criticism of Obama. Same with this footage from Michael Moore's "11/9" film, which footages is about Obama's visit to Flint, Michigan in the midst of their water crisis intentionally brought on by white political leaders. And really, take up my claim about Obama with Cornel West, won't ya? Anyway, many of the young Sanders campaign activists saw the 2016 election of Clinton and Trump had boiled down to "I've Got Mine" vs. "Get Off My Lawn." Most of these young activists saw the need to vote for, and did vote for, Clinton--and she still lost. And let's be brutally honest here: Clinton lost more because of older white people in the Rust Belt who took out their rage about trade deals which decimated their communities, and, instead of voting for leftists, voted for fascism and racism. Worse, in Michigan, nearly 70,000 people in African-American precincts did not vote for anyone for president, leaving the line blank for Trump or Clinton. Why? Maybe watch the entire Michael Moore "11/9" film. And let's get back to the point, what we just saw, and young activists rightly saw, in this primary season, was how the Democratic Party and corporate owned media thwarted our nation's progress--again. So tell me again how the SDSers appeal speaks to any of that, and why these younger and young people should care about an institution that hates them when not ignoring them.
The now old New Leftists from the SDS are saying, Please don't do what we did in 1968, meaning please don't sit out this year's presidential election. The problem with that argument is one they appear to have forgotten what they felt, and how they felt about older people lecturing them. And let's analyze an alternative history scenario where they had become convinced to vote for Humphrey and Humphrey prevailed over Nixon (and George Wallace, running as a third party out and out racist). What makes these aged former 1960s radicals so sure Hubert Humphrey would have stopped or even postponed the continuing rot in American society, when Humphrey showed no leadership skills for years, and was afraid to publicly speak, until the very end of his 1968 presidential campaign, anything that said clearly, We need to get out of Vietnam. Would "President" Humphrey have withstood General Abrams' Vietnamization policy which Nixon and Kissinger followed, or would the invasion of Cambodia and bombing of North Vietnam proceeded in much the same way? Would "President" Humphrey have been able to "open" Soviet Russia and Red China? Would "President" Humphrey have gotten passed to sign the Environmental Protection Act, if Republicans chose to oppose him for the usual petty, partisan politics the Republicans were already developing as a tactic? Would "President" Humphrey have enforced affirmative action and amended Title XI, if increasing numbers of senators in both parties were feeling the heat from corporate power and white reaction? Would "President" Humphrey have been able to challenge the national security state, when Humphrey the candidate failed to call out Nixon's treason in sabotaging the peace talks? Yes, Humphrey's judicial appointments would have been much better--no Justice Rehnquist, but no Justice Blackmun, either. Would a "President" Humphrey have supported labor reform to protect against the decline of labor, specifically repealing parts of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts? He claimed to support labor reform, but there is simply no record of his fighting for that reform. It is like Harry "Give 'em heck, not hell" Truman on national health insurance in 1948. Meanwhile, the steep decline in the younger generations would have continued.*****
Historically speaking, I think Biden compares poorly to Humphrey because Biden has been wrong on nearly every existential issue that has led to our situation today, and what younger people especially face. Biden has never confronted the powers-that-be in our society. At least Humphrey stood tall in that moment in 1948 for civil rights when it was not a position a majority of white Americans held at the time. Oh, and let's remind ourselves again how the young are correct to criticize how abjectly passive Television Generation Boomer-and-Older-Democratic-Party-primary-voters are in trusting corporate media narratives. I had warned about that last one, and that trust proved far deep than I thought just two months ago. Maybe, instead of putting the pressure on these young people, the aged SDSers' appeal should have said, Kids, let's talk in a few months--but, right now, we support your refusal to endorse Biden because we think we should work with you to get leverage over Biden's VP pick and what he is going to say to the American people to improve all of our lives.
For those who respond to my standing with the younger people, "Hey, older, white, suburban guy, check your privilege," I say, first, who is saying that? It better not be another white, suburban person sitting in economic comfort. For me, I stand with young activists who include African-Americans, and the largely-erased-from-the-corporate-media-conversation, Latinos, as well as millions of young and younger women who did so much to help support Bernie Sanders' campaign. And I feel badly for the older African-Americans in the Confederacy, who voted for Biden more out of cynical fear that says no white politician promising to help means it, or is crazy, than anything else.
So, old SDSers, please save your mid-April appeal in the midst of a pandemic, which pandemic is changing the world every single day. What we older people owe these kids is an apology, not a lecture. The ones who need a lecture, and I just gave it, are us Boomers, and the doddering Oldsters still among us, the majority of whom continue to vote for corporatists, fascists, and racists who don't give a damn about the young people or the planet. I know hardly anyone will read what I have written, but I wrote this more for the Internet wilderness, as Victor Serge wrote his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and last novel, Unforgiving Years, for the desk drawer. Even I.F Stone knew he was speaking mostly into a void, when he wrote, in his 1969 essay defending campus rebels:
Someone said a man's character was his fate, and tragedy may be implicit in the character of our society and of its rebels. How make a whisper for patience heard amid the rising fury?
And, let's set out this warning: If our children and grandchildren decide, in fifteen years or less, to kill us, rather than pay for our Social Security and Medicare-for-all-who-want it (insert Pete Buttigeig smiling face here), I sadly understand. It is just too bad the venal, racist, stupid, self-centered, comfortable, hateful parents of the Sixties radicals never heeded Frank Zappa in March 1968:
All your children are poor, unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control
A plague upon your ignorance and the gray despair of your ugly life...
All your children are poor, unfortunate victims of lies you believe
A plague upon your ignorance that keeps the young from the truth they deserve
In this time of a pandemic, or even plague, what Frank Zappa meant above all was these are just young people in their early to mid-20s, and some in their 30s still struggling. Their parents brought them into the world, and, as always, without their consent. Their parents also made their world--and the children are desperately trying to make a better world. What we, as parents, owe to our children and grandchildren, is a better and just world. When they demand a better and just world, we should defer to their demand, and openly join them--not lecture them for being naive about how things could always be worse, or how petulantly they are behaving. What I.F. Stone wrote about the SDSers 50 years ago applies more to these young people today: The young activists and radicals are the ones who are our best hope.
Footnotes
* Humphrey further showed this refusal or fear in meeting leadership requirements in his time when, after securing the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in August 1968, refused to come out foursquare in favor of ending the War Against Vietnam. Strategically, he showed poor political hard knuckles judgment in refusing to go public with the fact Nixon and his campaign were sabotaging the peace talks President Johnson had initiated to try and end a war Johnson himself had doubts about. Let's think of that next time we blame a minority of the radical young people for sitting out the presidential election of 1968, which ended in a close election and electoral victory for Richard Nixon. Sorta like blaming the iconic Ralph Nader for Al Gore and his legal team never trying to have the overvotes in Florida counted, which, if counted, showed Gore won Florida, too.
** And for those who may ask why didn't the young radicals protest at the Republican National Convention that year, well, the Republicans looked weak to many young activist people in 1968 (polling suggested otherwise), but, more importantly, the War Against Vietnam had escalated under two successive Democratic Party presidential administrations. What many student radicals did not themselves understand at the time (though slightly older radical journalists such as Robert Scheer did), but most learned after the release of the Pentagon Papers, the war against the Vietnamese people was a bi-partisan affair, and one which was tied up in the premises of the Cold War itself--and which was part of the basis for the very prosperity of the largely white affluent society. In turn, Michael Harrington tore open the curtain behind that society to reveal utter and systemic poverty, which made liberals and the then-moderates feel guilty, but not enough to really change the system that created the poverty.
***See my Amazon Shorts analysis of the 1968 election, and why I still believe only Robert F. Kennedy had the best and perhaps only chance to hold together a black-white pro-let's finish the New Deal coalition in that tumultuous year.
**** Howe's sharply worded reply to Rahv also contains a drive-by attack against Isaac Deutscher, which was par for the course for Howe against the then recently-dead Deutscher. Howe had, in the early 1960s, written a nasty essay against Deutscher regarding Deutscher's critique of Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr. Zhivago. I have deeply admired most of Deutscher's writings, but found Howe's essay convincing that Deutscher missed the significance of Pasternak's semi-polemical novel, which novel was later adapted into a much-beloved, at the time, film. However, when I read Deutscher's original essay (I read this in book form in Deutscher's Ironies of History), I was stunned at Howe's bad faith interpretation of what Deutscher had written. Howe was also nasty, and in bad faith, in attacking I.F. Stone. Howe considered Stone essentially a hack Stalinist, when Stone was a Popular Front New Dealer in the 1930s, back when Howe was a Trotskyist calling the New Deal "social fascistic." See the I.F. Stone biography which best gets this point about Stone's actual 1930s politics, Robert Cotrell's I.F. Stone.
***** And please, please, please stop with "the Communists caused Hitler to take over Germany" garbage. Read the Wiki page on Hitler's rise to power, just for starters, and then come back here. Okay? Now, look at what happened. In an election in July 1932, the Nazis received 37.3% of the vote, a plurality lead. However, German President Hindenburg, in the late summer of 1932, refused to let Hitler become chancellor, favoring instead a Catholic monarchist, Franz von Papen. With no stable government, and with continuing actual violence going on, mostly from the Nazis and their related factions, the Nazis lost 35 seats in the German legislature in a subsequent election in November 1932, and received only 33.1% of the vote, still a plurality. The results showed the Nazis were becoming less, not more, popular. Nonetheless, this time, President Hindenburg allowed Hitler to be named chancellor. Why? Not because of the Communists. It was because the business and wealthy farmer classes rose up, and coalesced, to demand Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor.
So few ever analyze why it is the Communists did not join with the Social Democrats to demand Hindenburg to let them form a coalition government. Well, it was not merely a dictate from Moscow. What the German Communists knew was the personal contempt the Social Democrats had for these same German Communists, and most importantly, how the Social Democrats, in the mid-1920s, deserted the Communists when there were general strikes in Bavaria and elsewhere throughout much of Germany in the mid-1920s. The Social Democrats openly and strongly sided with the forces of business people reaction. The Social Democrats actively proposed and supported violent, repressive measures against those striking workers, which divided and decimated the power of the working classes, which helped lead to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the first place. Victor Serge's real-time reports from the early-1920s are excellent about this. Finally, what makes anyone really think the Social Democrats wanted anything other than capitulation from the Communists, and not a meaningful coalition? And would a Social Democratic-led government have acted--note the irony here--as the Nazis did in putting Germans back to work, and standing up to the World War I victors over continuing to pay reparations in a world wide Depression era? This is most certainly not a defense of the Nazis, as much as a plea to stop, after nearly 100 years of propaganda, this again, garbage about the Nazis' rise being "the" fault of German Communists, as opposed to weak-kneed Social Democrats who refused to support real pro-worker change when it was occurring in the mid-1920s, and, in 1932, the civil-war like violence in the streets, and, most significantly, the business leaders and community, and German Catholic monarchists pushing for Hitler to take over as chancellor. So just stop, SDSers. Please. Stop blaming the left for the rot in a society that comes from the very type of people you are lecturing these young people to stand in line and support--especially, again, in April.
***** And please, please, please stop with "the Communists caused Hitler to take over Germany" garbage. Read the Wiki page on Hitler's rise to power, just for starters, and then come back here. Okay? Now, look at what happened. In an election in July 1932, the Nazis received 37.3% of the vote, a plurality lead. However, German President Hindenburg, in the late summer of 1932, refused to let Hitler become chancellor, favoring instead a Catholic monarchist, Franz von Papen. With no stable government, and with continuing actual violence going on, mostly from the Nazis and their related factions, the Nazis lost 35 seats in the German legislature in a subsequent election in November 1932, and received only 33.1% of the vote, still a plurality. The results showed the Nazis were becoming less, not more, popular. Nonetheless, this time, President Hindenburg allowed Hitler to be named chancellor. Why? Not because of the Communists. It was because the business and wealthy farmer classes rose up, and coalesced, to demand Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor.
So few ever analyze why it is the Communists did not join with the Social Democrats to demand Hindenburg to let them form a coalition government. Well, it was not merely a dictate from Moscow. What the German Communists knew was the personal contempt the Social Democrats had for these same German Communists, and most importantly, how the Social Democrats, in the mid-1920s, deserted the Communists when there were general strikes in Bavaria and elsewhere throughout much of Germany in the mid-1920s. The Social Democrats openly and strongly sided with the forces of business people reaction. The Social Democrats actively proposed and supported violent, repressive measures against those striking workers, which divided and decimated the power of the working classes, which helped lead to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the first place. Victor Serge's real-time reports from the early-1920s are excellent about this. Finally, what makes anyone really think the Social Democrats wanted anything other than capitulation from the Communists, and not a meaningful coalition? And would a Social Democratic-led government have acted--note the irony here--as the Nazis did in putting Germans back to work, and standing up to the World War I victors over continuing to pay reparations in a world wide Depression era? This is most certainly not a defense of the Nazis, as much as a plea to stop, after nearly 100 years of propaganda, this again, garbage about the Nazis' rise being "the" fault of German Communists, as opposed to weak-kneed Social Democrats who refused to support real pro-worker change when it was occurring in the mid-1920s, and, in 1932, the civil-war like violence in the streets, and, most significantly, the business leaders and community, and German Catholic monarchists pushing for Hitler to take over as chancellor. So just stop, SDSers. Please. Stop blaming the left for the rot in a society that comes from the very type of people you are lecturing these young people to stand in line and support--especially, again, in April.
