The radicals of the 60s had another side: decentralist, anti-interventionist, and almost Kirkian.
By Bill Kauffman
The ghosts of 1968 are haunting Barack Obama, which is tremendously unfair, I say as his coeval, given that our cohort spent the Chicago Democratic Convention sticking baseball cards in our bicycle spokes rather than pelting Mayor Daleys finest with porcine epithets. But guilt by association is ironclad in these days when American political discourse is controlled by hall monitors and tattletales. Obamas friendshipacquaintance?with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn is about to get extended play as the Republicans contrast Obamas Weatherfriends with their nominees stint in the Hanoi Hilton.
By his own account, John McCain lived in North Vietnamese captivity longer than anywhere else in his itinerant life. This deracination and the resultant military-brat pathologies on display in McCain will go unexploited by the Democrats, whose nominee-in-waiting and maid-of-dishonor are just as placeless as Carpetbag John. And besides, the entire political class of Washington has all the indigenous flavor of the Crystal City Metro station. It would never occur to an attack-ad maker that there was anything wrong with rootlessness.
If Obama bears the standard, the revolutionary posturing of Bill (kill your parents) Ayers and Bernardine (bring the war home) Dohrn will serve as the synecdoche of 68 in Republican minds. Prepare for another aphasiac episode in what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia. But I say to hell with Ayers and Dohrn. Let us remember the other New Lefta humane, decentralist, thoroughly American New Left that regarded socialism as a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy, in the words of Carl Oglesby, president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1965-66 and a key figure in its Middle American wing, which extended from independent anti-imperialist liberals to trans-Mississippi Prairie Power radicals. (Texas anarchists, sneered the elite East Coast-schooled red-diaper babies at the hell-raising directional state college Prairie Power kids.)
As Old Right historian Leonard Liggio wrote in 1970, Since there was little official SDS ideology, and what there was was populist and libertarian, it was attractive to the large numbers of American students who were growing conscious of their opposition to the educational factory system, the bureaucracy, the draft and the war. This libertarian Middle American tendency faded as humorless Marxists and violent fanatics à la Ayers and Dohrn blew SDS apart. But even as it decomposed, the New Left was an olio of old-fashioned American rebellion, a naïve idealization of Third World revolutionaries and the bomb-happy Marxism of groups such as Weatherman. The sager figures in the New Left, however, rejected television, IBM, nomadic corporate culture, and the Cold Warall profoundly anti-conservative forcesand I wonder just what is so Left about that?
The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto of SDS, was drawn up in large part by the Michigan Catholic baseball fan Tom Hayden. The statement is a mixed bag: denunciations of racial bigotry, bureaucracy, and the militarization of American life bump into simultaneous calls for national healthcare and an expanded welfare state. Yet the Port Huron Statement, and SDS, emphasized the core principle of decentralization, of breaking overly large institutions and even cities down to a more human scale, based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society.
We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things, declared the authors. The line might have been written by another Michigan lad, Russell Kirk of Mecosta. Kirk was no New Leftist, though he did later befriendand in 1976 voted forEugene McCarthy, the peace candidate of the 1968 Democratic primaries, the distributist-inclined Catholic intellectual who befuddled his conventional liberal supporters with talk of a salutary depersonalizing of the presidency, of reducing that office to its constitutional dimensions, shorn of the accreted cult of personality.
Left and Right mostly hurled anathemas at each other in 1968, but not always, and the rare friendly exchanges over the phantom barriers were rich with promisea promise fulfilled, in a way, one year later, in the 1969 New York City mayoralty campaign of Norman Mailer, who campaigned as a left conservative on a platform of power to the neighborhoods.
But SDS president Carl Oglesby was the New Left figure who first saw the potential of a Left-Right linkage.
Oglesby was the son of rural working-class Southerners who had joined the diaspora North, where his father worked in an Akron rubber factory. Said dad to his radical son: Damn it, you ought to get yourself a real job where you can settle down and take care of your family and quit all this unpatriotic horses--t. Carl did not follow his fathers advice, but just hearing it mattered.
Oglesby was a playwrighthe had written a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feudtoiling within the military-industrial complex at Bendix Aerospace Systems when, fresh off the composition of an anti-Vietnam War position paper, he was elected president of SDS in June 1965. He was, at once, both more radical and more conservative than Hayden and the organizations leftist activists. As he writes in his recent memoir, Ravens in the Storm, I believed that Americas small-r republicans would also have to get engaged if the antiwar cause were to have the least chance of succeeding.
Taking up his predecessor Paul Potters challenge to name the system, Oglesby made his own name with a November 1965 speech in Washington in which he fingered corporate liberalism as the system that creates and sustains the war in Vietnam. He named names: not Goldwater or Kirk but Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, and Goldberg.
