The New Left Today: America’s Trojan Horse

The New Left Today: America’s Trojan Horse, by Phillip Abbott Luce (Capitol Hill Press, 164 pp., $6.95). This book does not demonstrate that the New Left is or ever was a Trojan Horse. The Horse made history; the New Left made malicious mischief. Professional “kids” like Rubin and Hoffman are getting a trifle long in the tooth, and some, like Rudd and Savio, have vanished. Does anyone still read C. Wright Mills? Has the New Left left us? “The New Left,” says Luce, “is polymorphic.” Luce’s somber tone cannot conceal the fact that the New Left was even more comic than polymorphic. Indeed, if there was just a touch of Evelyn Waugh in Luce, he could have written a light classic about SDS denouncing the Vietcong as “revisionist sellouts,” or the Black Panthers accusing the Weathermen of “Custerism.” Luce tells us rather more than we want to know about the imperceptible “rise” and “fall” of the Progressive Labor Party. But his book is an instructive guide to the banality of the politics on which yesterday’s radicals were weaned. It is a kind of Last Picture Show for those (they are now junior faculty) who are nostalgic for the ideological faces of their recent youth. g. f. will