Originally appeared in the Boston Globe
The onetime president of SDS calls on liberals of his
generation to embrace an older form of patriotism
By Harvey Blume
IN 1963, Todd Gitlin was president of Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS), the main vehicle for student activism during the
'60s. Gitlin's landmark account of those years, "The Sixties: Years of Hope,
Days of Rage" (1987), along with seven other books--including his 1999
novel, "Sacrifice"--and innumerable shorter pieces, constitute engagé
writing at its best. What you get from Gitlin is the convergence of a deep
political culture with a sharp sense of urgency.
Now a professor of journalism at Columbia University,
Gitlin's own version of that patriotism is instructive. By the end of the '60s,
as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, SDS disintegrated into opposing
factions. Burn-out and extremism were common responses. Gitlin avoided both by
drawing on an older tradition of radicalism, exemplified by the sociologists C.
Wright Mills and David Riesman and the literary critic Irving Howe. In the new
book, Gitlin shows that despite vast differences among them, these thinkers
could make trenchant criticisms of the United States without succumbing to anti-Americanism.
Gitlin believes this ability--the absence of which, he argues, fatally
disfigures the work of Noam Chomsky, among others--is an essential ingredient
of the patriotism he stands for.
While Gitlin vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, he
does not believe that "bring the troops home!"--the key slogan of
Vietnam-era protests--is automatically transferable to Iraq now. Gitlin's is a patriotism
that does not dodge complexity.
IDEAS: You opposed the invasion of Iraq, but you're not
convinced that a Vietnam-style solution--withdrawal--makes sense?
GITLIN: True. With respect to Vietnam, we always knew that
it was a matter of when, not if, with respect to America withdrawal--a question
of how many Vietnamese would still be alive. But the Iraq situation is different.
It's a measure of the awfulness of administration policy that none of the
outcomes are pretty or predictable. And I take the point that once you go in,
you're not morally entitled to simply walk away.
IDEAS: You inveigh against what you call left-wing
fundamentalism in the book. Why?
GITLIN: I'm talking about people who always have one answer
to the mysteries of the world: Namely, find the American dogs, they've done it
again. There's a tremendous intellectual laziness to this position. It's
automatic thinking--much of it coming out of Cambridge, Mass., by the way--that
evades the turmoil and confusion of the world. It's an intellectual cheat.
IDEAS: But what power does left-wing fundamentalism have to
change anything?
GITLIN: No political power. But it does have obstructive
power. It interferes with a thought process we would benefit from.
The reason I contrast left-wing fundamentalists with Howe,
Riesman, and Mills, is that those guys all aspired to a large view of how America
works. They were very much living in this country. The fundamentalist left
lives in the stratosphere; it's a stratosphere left.
IDEAS: You maintain that liberals, in effect, have their own
version of Vietnam Syndrome, the belief that America can never be right to resort
to force.
GITLIN: The left developed an anti-patriotic melodrama in
the '60s, but should have learned since that there are occasions that fall outside
that story, times in which the impulse to intervene is not a matter of
extending American power. That was true in Kosovo. Had we gone in, it would
have been true of Rwanda. What makes intervention in Darfur extremely unlikely
is the commitment in Iraq; we don't have much of an army left.
IDEAS: When you discuss citizenship, why does the word "sacrifice"
comes up so often?
GITLIN: Citizenship, yeah. I'm old-fashioned in thinking
there are citizenly virtues which amount to moral virtues, which can't be shunted
aside, and for which there is no magic solvent, like the Internet, which
presumably would enable me to conduct my politics without ever leaving my
chair.
I spent a couple of weeks lecturing in China this fall. In
most audiences there were a few students who had a passionate need to know how
the world goes. They took seriously that they had an obligation to save China.
I speak to a lot of audiences in the States, and don't see that kind of desire
and commitment, which is what brought me into the student movement in the first
place. In our time, it's the right that has been able to mobilize it.
But it's a long pull. The people who set out to reinvent the
right in the early '60s were eventually rewarded, but it took them 20 years.
IDEAS: "Sacrifice" also happens to be the title of
your only novel.
GITLIN: As you know from that book, I'm fascinated by the Abraham-Isaac
story, by Abraham's appalling willingness to sacrifice his son. That's the dark
side of sacrifice.
Sacrifice means to make sacred. In a secular way, I preserve
the majesty of the idea, but warn against taking it literally. If we render
something sacred by destroying it, we've defeated ourselves. The serious person
becomes a fanatic, and the fanatic becomes a murderer. It's a theme that I
picked up from Camus when I was a teenager. It's the holy people who are most
dangerous.
Harvey Blume is a freelance writer based in Cambridge.
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