The "new leftist" appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work, and culture. Often, especially if white, the son of the middle class--and sometimes the son of middle-class parents nursing radical memories--he asserts his rebellion against the deceit and hollowness of American society. Very good; there is plenty to rebel against. But in the course of his rebellion he tends to reject not merely the middle-class ethos but a good many other things he too hastily associates with it: the intellectual heritage of the West, the tradition of liberalism at its most serious, the commitment to democracy as an indispensable part of civilized life. He tends to make style into the very substance of his revolt, and while he may, on one side of himself, engage in valuable activities in behalf of civil rights, student freedom, and so on, he nevertheless tacitly accepts the "givenness" of American society, has little hope or expectation of changing it, and thereby, in effect, settles for a mode of personal differentiation.
In the essay, Howe highlights several features of what we now call the New Left that he finds problematic, two of which he touches on here. First, there is a tendency to overvalue the present or recent past, at the expense of a longer, deeper tradition of things. Whatever one thinks about the merits of liberalism, it is a tradition in which we are bound up, and have been for a long time, the Enlightenment (whatever one thinks of it as) yet longer, and the priority of the individual longer still. One omits these, or glosses over them quickly, at the risk of not properly understanding the current political moment or, indeed, our past. Political theory as it is usually taught commits the sin of assuming nothing interesting happens between Aristotle and Machiavelli--or, if there is anything interesting, it can be summarized in fifty pages of Augustine and twenty pages of Thomas. It is just as much of a mutilation to take the position that the last 500 years have been a more-or-less tragic mistake, or that there is something fundamentally new in politics which the old sources are incapable of addressing. The New Left rejected what it saw as the flawed compromises of 1930s radicals, and in so doing learned none of the lessons their experience could bring, and lost interest in the liberalism that had preceded the 30s: thus they are in some way unable to articulate their project.
He also comments at greater length elsewhere in the essay on the flight from politics to style: the old liberalism believed that one makes change working through electoral politics in particular, as well as union and other local organizing. The new leftism, for him, is highlighted by an impatience, or imperfect commitment, to politics as carried out in this manner. But, of course, how can you have a politics that doesn't ground itself in actual politics?
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