The New Left & The Old Right

As the year 1966 was drawing to a close, Professor Charles Susskind of the University of California summed up his opinions of the student demonstrators on the Berkeley campus in these words: “I don’t know why they think of themselves as the New Left. Their methods look to me much more like those of the Nazi students whom I saw in the 1930s harassing deans, hounding professors and their families, making public disturbances, and interfering with lectures, until only professors sympathetic to the Nazi cause remained.” The _ professor’s comparison of the New Left with the Old Right is not only apt but just. It is sometimes forgotten that the Hitler youth took to the streets of Berlin in the years immediately preceding 1933 with the cry, “Out with the old crap.” For those not too familiar with the inelegant terminology of the youthful Nazis, it should be noted that they got it straight from a letter Karl Marx wrote to his friend Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann. And Marxists today, in instances too numerous to mention, are fond of repeating the “same old crap” as if they were words of divine revelation. But when the Nazis of the Left, the Beefsteak Nazis as they were called —brown on the outside and red on the inside—ranted their cries. of “down with theory, only action counts,” they were indeed imprinting an ideology all their own with hobnailed boots over the body of the German nation. This ideology was. largely an amalgam of racism, nationalism and Marxism, couched in terms of action, action, action. To a large extent mindlessness was its great appeal, but a kind of mindlessness that would lead ultimately to the destruction of the mind itself. But even the most inarticulate conception needs someone to verbalize it for the masses who, in the end, do all the acting when the actions are called for. So the “armed barbarians’ – of Nazism, the Brown Shirt intellectuals, went about finding virtues in the actions of the man in the street—the street fighter, the speechless apostle of the deed—and both Hitler for his movement (National Socialism) and Karl Radek for his (Communism) found him in the person of Leo Schlageter, the primordial martyr of Nazism, killed in a street brawl in Berlin in 1923 and mourned by Hitler and apostrophized by Radek as the symbol of the fallen proletariat. Later the Schlageters—the millions of them, imbued with the theory-less theory of action—would go about knocking the brains out of anyone who stood in their way (on university campus or off) in the march toward the chiliastic apocalypse of the Now. Freedom now, they shouted. Action! Speech is dead! We want action now! They got plenty of it during the next two decades.

But America of the Sixties is not Germany of the Twenties. Here history is merely repeating itself as farce. Our “alienated” student rebels and New Leftists are not rebelling against a nation in poverty—the libLeft poverty slogans of our day are mostly a matter of demagogy to help a few nerveless politicians to well-paying jobs at the public expense— they are protesting, it would seem, against too much of everything. Too much schooling, too much spending money, too much idleness, too much free entertainment on and off TV, and too much permissiveness in general. What they are seeking is a free ride to power, without the consequences or the responsibility of thinking things through. Thinking is hard work, and they would prefer to have others do it for them. That is why so much of their behavior is motivated by a compulsion for action—not serious involvement. When some of them do try to express themselves it usually comes in halting sentences beginning with “like” and ending with “man.” Or they assume a kind of military shorthand to describe their most piddling activities. Here is the way one leading representative of the New Left responded to a discussion of the subject in the over-cerebrated Partisan Review, Tom Hayden reporting: “Monday: Staff meeting at 10:00. Mike was supposed to have found bail money for this afternoon in case we have trouble. We didn’t.” Etcetera. “Noon: Tied up with phone calls to Episcopalian civil rights committee in New York; fund raising always hectic, but the bills get paid. Finally got to 18th Avenue at 2:00 o’clock. Told Mrs. Queen, who lives in a two-room place with no toilet or closet, about the demonstration. Said she’d be there.” Etcetera. “Four O’Clock: The people on the other block, Avon Avenue, were in a different situation. They had seen someone from the Traffic Division . . . [This minute-by-minute log of the day’s revolutionary activities is concerned with a demonstration—for a traffic light. But let’s continue the day’s military events and skirmishes. ] “Eleven O’Clock: Came back to apartment after eating with Sampson, who was jubilant.” (Cause of joy the fact that “the captain from the Fourth Precinct” made a call to the Deputy Mayor, who promised “an immediate ‘traffic study’ to determine if a traffic light is needed.”). Did I say farce? Of course I did and I meant it. All the more so since Sargent Shriver, another contributor to the PR symposium on the “New Radicalism” found it necessary to present his credentials as an intellec_ tual by quoting Gertrude Stein’s “It’s hard to write poetry in a late age,” and ending with the tired old words of the New Left, “Don’t get hung up.” At the same time—and with an assist

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Max Geltman

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As the year 1966 was drawing to a close, Professor Charles Susskind of the University of California summed up his opinions of the student demonstrators on the Berkeley campus in these words: “I don’t know why they think of themselves as the New Left. Their methods look to me much more like those of the Nazi students whom I saw in the 1930s harassing deans, hounding professors and their families, making public disturbances, and interfering with lectures, until only professors sympathetic to the Nazi cause remained.” The _ professor’s comparison of the New Left with the Old Right is not only apt but just. It is sometimes forgotten that the Hitler youth took to the streets of Berlin in the years immediately preceding 1933 with the cry, “Out with the old crap.” For those not too familiar with the inelegant terminology of the youthful Nazis, it should be noted that they got it straight from a letter Karl Marx wrote to his friend Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann. And Marxists today, in instances too numerous to mention, are fond of repeating the “same old crap” as if they were words of divine revelation. But when the Nazis of the Left, the Beefsteak Nazis as they were called —brown on the outside and red on the inside—ranted their cries. of “down with theory, only action counts,” they were indeed imprinting an ideology all their own with hobnailed boots over the body of the German nation. This ideology was. largely an amalgam of racism, nationalism and Marxism, couched in terms of action, action, action. To a large extent mindlessness was its great appeal, but a kind of mindlessness that would lead ultimately to the destruction of the mind itself. But even the most inarticulate conception needs someone to verbalize it for the masses who, in the end, do all the acting when the actions are called for. So the “armed barbarians’ – of Nazism, the Brown Shirt intellectuals, went about finding virtues in the actions of the man in the street—the street fighter, the speechless apostle of the deed—and both Hitler for his movement (National Socialism) and Karl Radek for his (Communism) found him in the person of Leo Schlageter, the primordial martyr of Nazism, killed in a street brawl in Berlin in 1923 and mourned by Hitler and apostrophized by Radek as the symbol of the fallen proletariat. Later the Schlageters—the millions of them, imbued with the theory-less theory of action—would go about knocking the brains out of anyone who stood in their way (on university campus or off) in the march toward the chiliastic apocalypse of the Now. Freedom now, they shouted. Action! Speech is dead! We want action now! They got plenty of it during the next two decades.

But America of the Sixties is not Germany of the Twenties. Here history is merely repeating itself as farce. Our “alienated” student rebels and New Leftists are not rebelling against a nation in poverty—the libLeft poverty slogans of our day are mostly a matter of demagogy to help a few nerveless politicians to well-paying jobs at the public expense— they are protesting, it would seem, against too much of everything. Too much schooling, too much spending money, too much idleness, too much free entertainment on and off TV, and too much permissiveness in general. What they are seeking is a free ride to power, without the consequences or the responsibility of thinking things through. Thinking is hard work, and they would prefer to have others do it for them. That is why so much of their behavior is motivated by a compulsion for action—not serious involvement. When some of them do try to express themselves it usually comes in halting sentences beginning with “like” and ending with “man.” Or they assume a kind of military shorthand to describe their most piddling activities. Here is the way one leading representative of the New Left responded to a discussion of the subject in the over-cerebrated Partisan Review, Tom Hayden reporting: “Monday: Staff meeting at 10:00. Mike was supposed to have found bail money for this afternoon in case we have trouble. We didn’t.” Etcetera. “Noon: Tied up with phone calls to Episcopalian civil rights committee in New York; fund raising always hectic, but the bills get paid. Finally got to 18th Avenue at 2:00 o’clock. Told Mrs. Queen, who lives in a two-room place with no toilet or closet, about the demonstration. Said she’d be there.” Etcetera. “Four O’Clock: The people on the other block, Avon Avenue, were in a different situation. They had seen someone from the Traffic Division . . . [This minute-by-minute log of the day’s revolutionary activities is concerned with a demonstration—for a traffic light. But let’s continue the day’s military events and skirmishes. ] “Eleven O’Clock: Came back to apartment after eating with Sampson, who was jubilant.” (Cause of joy the fact that “the captain from the Fourth Precinct” made a call to the Deputy Mayor, who promised “an immediate ‘traffic study’ to determine if a traffic light is needed.”). Did I say farce? Of course I did and I meant it. All the more so since Sargent Shriver, another contributor to the PR symposium on the “New Radicalism” found it necessary to present his credentials as an intellec_ tual by quoting Gertrude Stein’s “It’s hard to write poetry in a late age,” and ending with the tired old words of the New Left, “Don’t get hung up.” At the same time—and with an assist