Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. - book reviews

National Review, March 24, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Summit 337 pp., $19.95)

YEARS AGO, I suggested over an idle cocktail that when the New Left grew up, it would produce its own Chamberses and Burnhams, eloquent converts. Bill Buckley, usually indulgent toward kids, shook his head vehemently. He didn't think this generation was as intelligent or serious as the Old Left had been.

Time has proved him right about that, but I wasn't completely wrong. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, former editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts, are all I could have hoped for, even if there aren't many like them. Somehow they said goodbye to all that simultaneously and found themselves voting for Ronald Reagan. Their partnership has continued through the change.

Destructive Generation is a collection of articles they have written since their conversion. If there is such a thing as must reading about the New

' Left, this is it. Collier and Horowitz know the scene from the inside, and they write about it with intelligence, gossipy intimacy, and a sort of savage introspection. There's not a trace of sentimentality about the Left's "idealism," which they correctly interpret as malicious. fantasizing.

The first three chapters are narratives of the Sixties. One concerns Fay Stender, lawyer to the Black Panther set in Berkeley, who threw herself into her causes with such passion that she would contrive sexual couplings with her clients when she visited them in prison. When she began to sense that they were just thugs, not revolutionaries, she drew back from them; they decided she must be informing on them (she wasn't) and sent one of their pals to kill her in her home. For a drama whose moral doesn't need spelling out, this one is hard to beat.

Another is a long history of the Weather Underground, starring the movement's femme fatale, Bernardine Dohrn, and the men she manipulated. This one manages to convey both the deadly excitement of the time and the unconscious comedy of the New Left's internal status system.

The middle section of the book discusses the New Left's legacy in a fiery polemical style. It explains why men like Tom Hayden and Ron Dellums have never grown up: For leftists, there are only tomorrows. They never talk about the evil they have done, except superficially, to imply (as Hayden does) that it has increased their moral sensitivity. But they are always anxious to discuss the utopia to come. The future perfect is the only tense in their political grammar. Thus they are willing to criticize every revolution but the one currently unfolding-the one in which there is still a choice. Their opponents' misdeeds must never be forgotten, but their own can never really be recalled. While Central America is alleged by leftists to be "another Vietnam," Nicaragua is never another Cuba.

There are also exposes of crude hypocrisy. Hayden, for instance, is given to lachrymose public recollections of his grief at the assassination of Robert Kennedy, whom at the time he'd been privately reviling as "a little fascist." And there's an especially sharp discussion of the way the New Left came to terms with the Old Left, in spite of all its disclaimers of pro-Soviet allegiance. The political thought of Noam Chomsky is a notable casualty of the Collier-Horowitz analysis.

In separate chapters toward the end, the authors discuss their own personal backgrounds. Collier was the son of poor Republicans, and came to radical politics in college. Horowitz was to the manner born: his father was a dedicated Communist whose love for the Party was unrequited. It's a dismally pathetic story. When the old man died a few years ago, none of his Stalinist friends could work up any genuine sentiment for him: they eulogized him in the stale phrases of an abstract ideology ("tried to make the world a better place . . . socially conscious"). A long life had been lived without real affection for the country, the neighborhood; utterly alienated, utterly wasted.

Horowitz tells this appalling story in a voice of savage introspection. He rejected his father's Communism early, but he had his own near miss: he too tried to live in fealty to "the Progressive Idea," until the fate of Vietnam and Cambodia opened his eyes to what he and his generation had done. He found almost no remorse among his colleagues: the New Left turned out to have been just as irresponsibly dogmatic as the Old.

"You and I and our parents were totalitarians in democratic America," he tells an old friend. "The democratic fact of America prevented us from committing the atrocities willed by our faith. Impotence was our only innocence." The Left's rhetoric of "compassion" and "humanity" masks its real motives, "nihilism and hate."

Collier and Horowitz consider themselves conservatives now, but they find it hard to feel close to other conservatives, simply because they arrived at their destination by such a peculiar route. They seem to have been almost alone in intending New Left cant seriously and in being willing to test it against reality, For most, it was just a set of attitudes that have now settled into the political culture, especiallyare less spectacular than Tolstoy's, I do not believe he regards them as much less serious. He seems to wish to portray the Neumiller family as a single, broad psychic entity, with the unstable Charles as its customary speaker, and to show the effects of Midwestern American history and culture upon this family psyche. Here is a large undertaking and a thoughtful one; it is not yet possible to say how successful it will be.