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Student 'Activists' Then and Now
| Article
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13991 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
2,555 Words |
| Author
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David Horowitz
David Horowitz, former editor of Ramparts, is codirector of
the Second Thoughts Project, a speakers and writers bureau of
the National Forum Foundation. |
In April 15, 1980, as invading Soviet armies poured across the Afghanistan border, a thousand students assembled for a "'Stop the War' Teach-In" on the University of California campus at Berkeley. Their protests were not addressed to the Soviet invader, however, but to the Carter White House which had condemned the attack and had requested defense increases and a military draft as deterrents to Soviet aggression. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce these anticommunist paranoia and to condemn them as preludes to "another Vietnam" and as threats to the peace.
These echoes of the radical past were far from incidental to the event that served to kick off the activism of a new political decade. Those in the crowd who were too young to make the connections for themselves were guided by the parade of middle-aged political veterans who mounted the rostrum at the invitation of the protest organizers. Communist Party leader Angela Davis and Berkeley radical congressman Ron Dellums may have played minor roles in the sixties' political drama, but they were center stage at its eighties revival. Recalling how similar "teach-ins" and anti-draft protests had changed history in Vietnam, they applauded the symbolism the organizers had contrived: The time had come, they said, to revive the political enthusiasms of the past and its radical discontents.
If the episode revealed the self-conscious effort of eighties activism to identify itself as a child of the sixties, it also exposed the contradiction inherent in such a claim. The radicalism of the sixties had identified itself as a child without political parents. Its most famous slogan--You can't trust anyone over thirty--meant exactly what it said.
Roots Of Radicalism
Sixties activism was born as a self-conscious attempt to reject one tainted politics (Stalinism) and to atone for another (liberalism). Therein lay its redeeming originality and its aura of idealism and political innocence. Eighties activism was born in an opposite effort to revive the tainted politics that had been previously rejected and to appropriate the aura of idealism and innocence that the rejection had gained. Therein lies the cynicism of its political commitments and the deviousness of its political styles.
The cynicism of today's radicals is immediately apparent in their self-presentation as "progressives" and "liberals." Eighties radicals are not only comfortable with these political labels, they insist on them,
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