Charles Tasnadi/AP Photo
Students by the thousands, protesting U.S. participation in the fighting in Vietnam, move along the Mall toward the U.S. Capitol on April 17, 1965, after a rally at the Washington Monument.
In homage to my friend Todd Gitlin, who died on February 5, I’ve been rereading his wise and prescient book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. I read the book not long after it came out in 1987 and had not looked at it again since. It is even more powerful than I remember it, and profoundly relevant today.
I know of no other book that displays such insight about the fraught era that began my own political lifetime and contoured the decades that followed, especially the awkward relationship between liberals and radicals who resent each other and need each other. Only occasionally do radicals and liberals make their uneasy coalition work, as in the great labor gains of the 1930s and the epic civil rights achievements of the 1960s. We desperately need such an alliance now, if Joe Biden and the Democrats are to keep fascism at bay and restore the promise of American democracy.
This magazine has always stood at the intersection of liberal and radical—“the left edge of the possible,” in Michael Harrington’s splendid phrase. At the beginning of his administration, liberals did not have great hopes for Joe Biden, and radicals were openly contemptuous. But Biden has turned out to be the most progressive president since FDR, both in his aspirations and in his appointees, rejecting the fatal delusions of neoliberalism that so undermined Clinton and Obama, and sapped the faith of working people in Democrats. It’s even more remarkable given Biden’s lack of a reliable working majority in Congress.
The Prospect’s role in the Biden era has been to put forth ideas for progressive policies, many of which can be achieved by executive action; to investigate the corporate undertow that continues to stunt the promise of the political moment; to issue warnings when the Biden administration seems at risk of being captured; and to dispense praise when it is earned.
Some in the further-left press can manage only attacks on Biden, as if he could somehow conjure 51 or 60 votes in the Senate if only he were more boldly radical. This stance seems less than helpful, and it brings me back to the wisdom of Todd Gitlin.
Todd was a couple of years ahead of me in college. He went off to Harvard in 1959, and I began Oberlin in 1961. That was the dawn of an era when long-deferred reforms seemed possible, and that faith kindled the idealism of a whole generation. The early part of the ’60s were Gitlin’s Years of Hope.
Our generation saw in the civil rights movement and its uneasy alliance with Lyndon Johnson the redemption of a promise deferred since Lincoln. We saw in the Great Society the completion of the New Deal. Todd Gitlin, at age 20, was elected the second president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963.
Looking back a quarter-century later, he writes as both a participant and a critic, but as a compassionate critic. Early SDS, inspired by the promise of the moment, was more left-liberal than radical. Read the SDS founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, today, and it sounds almost Jeffersonian.
At Harvard in February 1962, Todd helped organize a Washington protest to call for a nuclear test ban treaty. Such was the faith in the promise of the Kennedy administration and the power of reason that the young protesters asked for and got meetings with senior administration officials. Todd recalls: “President Kennedy, with his fine eye for public relations, dispatched a liveried White House butler with a huge urn of hot coffee to the demonstrators picketing in the snow—who proceeded to debate whether drinking the President’s coffee amounted to selling out.”
This was the era of hope. The civil rights movement of the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-ins were doing nothing more than holding America to its ideals, and the Kennedy administration to its campaign promises. Gitlin writes:
At its luminous best, what the movement did was stamped with imagination. The sit-in, for example, was a powerful tactic because the act itself was unexceptionable. What were the Greensboro students doing, after all, but sitting at a lunch counter, trying to order a hamburger or a cup of coffee? They did not petition the authorities, who, in any case, would have paid no heed; in strict Gandhian fashion, they asserted that they had a right to sit at the counter by sitting at it, and threw the burden of disruption onto the upholders of white supremacy. Instead of saying that segregation ought to stop, they acted as if segregation no longer existed.
I quote that passage at length both because it displays Todd’s gift for insight and language, and because it captures the era’s sense of hope. In the early 1960s, the movement could make a bargain with the Johnson administration to shift from confrontational direct action to the most apple-pie activity of all, registering to vote. In return, the administration promised to defend that right. But it took more violence on the part of the sheriffs, and more deaths and beatings, before Johnson threatened to send in troops and finally persuaded Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But by then, as Gitlin painfully recounts, the years of hope were past, wrecked by Vietnam and by Johnson’s efforts not to alienate the white South. The radicals came into the fateful Democratic Convention of 1964 in Atlantic City thinking they could still work with the liberals. The ingenious SDS slogan was “Part of the Way with LBJ,” meaning that they were with LBJ on the Great Society but not on Vietnam; and that even the Great Society would only take us part of the way. (I still have the button. I was there with the Young Democrats, smuggling floor passes to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.)
It all fell apart with the convention’s refusal to seat the MFDP, and the radicals of that era never quite trusted the liberals again. The deepening Vietnam catastrophe only deepened the mistrust. The hope of working within the system seemed briefly to be restored when anti-war activists forced Johnson to abdicate, portending the nomination of Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy. But that aspiration died with Kennedy’s murder.
The movement itself fragmented, into Black nationalists and integrationists; peaceful protesters and makers of Molotov cocktails and bombs. Some of the more extreme fragments of the left not only blew themselves up; they blew up the movement. In the election of 1968, most people I knew could not bring themselves to vote for Hubert Humphrey. I voted for Eldridge Cleaver. There followed Richard Nixon and half a century of neoliberalism and then Trumpism. Every New Left veteran I ask now wishes they had voted for Humphrey.
The promise of the political moment was destroyed, mostly by the mulish stupidity of the Cold War corporate liberals, but also by the miscalculation and grandiosity of some on the left. Gitlin writes, “One of the core narratives of the Sixties is the story of the love-hate relations of radicals and liberals. To oversimplify: Radicals needed liberals, presupposed them, borrowed rising expectations from them, were disappointed by them—radically disappointed … then concluded that liberals—suspicious, possessive, and quellers of trouble—were ‘the enemy.’”
Today, half a century later, the stakes are even higher and there is no margin for error. Thirty years ago, in the preface to a new 1992 edition of The Sixties, Todd Gitlin was again way ahead of his time. He warned—and this may be painful to read:
“Movements that seek to represent underrepresented people too often harden into self-seeking. The result is balkanization fueled by a narcissism of small differences, each group claiming the high ground of principle, squandering moral energy in behalf of what has come to be called ‘identity politics’—in which the principal purpose of organizing is to express a distinct social identity rather than achieve the collective good. In this radical extension of the politics of the late Sixties, difference and victimization are prized, ranked against the victimization of other groups. We crown our good with victimhood.” Ouch. Todd wrote that, not as some kind of cultural neoconservative, but as the best kind of thoughtful and fearless radical.
Comparing the condescending white supremacist inquisition of Ketanji Brown Jackson with the civil rights hopes of the early and mid-1960s, when most of America, including more than half the Republicans in the Senate, favored voting rights, is to feel that we have gone backwards. What’s at stake is not just the extension of full democracy to Black Americans but democracy at all. We simply do not have the luxury of fragmentation and mistrust. To save democracy and return to a path of possible progressive reform, we need the broadest coalition possible.
There will be a public memorial to Todd Gitlin this coming Saturday at Columbia University.
