January 25, 2008
"Protestant antinomian" student radicals
In the current issue of The Nation, Maurice Isserman discusses memoirs by three 1960s-era radicals and one history of the SDS. He opens by referring to Elinor Langer's 1973 essay "Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s," in which the writer and teacher, active in the civil rights movement, was "dismayed to discover ... that students ... were already in the process of idolizing her." Isserman continues:
The fate of the student movement of the 1960s, she argued, was determined when its leaders made the "curiously apolitical" decision to start thinking of themselves as revolutionaries:Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to dirty one's hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi (meaning: the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was also ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice.
That the New Left "mistook revolution...for a moral choice" is the best one-sentence summary I've ever read of the complexities of late-'60s radicalism. I would suggest a corollary that seems implicit in Langer's essay. The movement's revolutionary turn was not so much a measure of its un- or anti-American character, as conservative critics would have it, but rather an indication that, if anything, the New Left might have been a bit too American for its own good. Its impatience with the half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk ("putting your body on the line," as the saying went) revealed the movement as an exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant antinomian tradition of radical individualism—one whose adherents defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings of God's voice wherever they might lead. "John Brown is a good symbol for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to attack Harper's Ferry."
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