A Harvard graduate student in sociology, later an editor of Dissent, did a study of the ’67 referendum, and the findings were disturbing to old leftists—and even to new ones. In the old language, we had strong bourgeois support and virtually no working-class support. Or, more scientifically, the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to vote against the war. What is wrong with this picture?
What’s wrong became clearer the next year when I was working for Eugene McCarthy. A few of the CNC activists moved into draft resistance, but most of us were committed to electoral politics; we wanted to be where the people were, or where large numbers of them were, and that seemed to require engagement within the Democratic Party. So we sent volunteers to New Hampshire in February 1968, and we even succeeded in forcing the Boston/Cambridge Democrats to include a few of our people among the delegates they sent to the Democratic National Convention that summer. But our effort to be where the people were produced the same odd result as in the referendum. Though we never did a survey, I am pretty sure it was true that the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to support McCarthy.
But no left or liberal candidate can win an election with that kind of support. There is nothing wrong with people who pay high rents or own expensive houses; many of them, too, are salt of the earth. And I still believe that our position on the war was the right one. But we were a little too sure about that rightness and a little too proud of our high-mindedness. Confronting patriotic citizens from Cambridge’s working-class neighborhoods, who were far more likely than our supporters were to have kids in Vietnam, we had neither charity nor humility. In the CNC, we didn’t spell America with a “k” and we didn’t wave Viet Cong flags, but some of our allies did, and we never figured out how to distance ourselves from them. Too many leftists in those years believed in the maxim of “No enemies to the left!” And the result was that we made enemies to our right that we didn’t need to make, men and women whom we needed to have as friends.
ONLY CONNNECT! is a better maxim. It’s when leftists fail to connect with the people whose side we think we are on that we are tempted by vanguard politics. If we are not connected, it must be because we are so far out in front. Or, we are tempted by a kind of virtual politics. If we are not connected, it must be because we disdain parochial loyalties; we are universal men and women—we are really connected to Vietnamese peasants and to all the oppressed peoples of the third world, even if they don’t know it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has some admirably harsh lines about people who love humanity but can’t get along with their neighbors. That is not a formula for democratic success, because it is your neighbors who vote.
The problem of left politics, then and now, is how to hold unpopular opinions and still connect with “the people”—or with enough of them. One strategy is to focus on bread-and-butter policies, on welfare, health care, and the minimum wage, where we have a good chance to convince large numbers of our neighbors and to stand with the people we are standing for. But sometimes we have to go public on harder issues—to oppose a war or call for massive foreign aid or set limits on the tough-minded pursuit of national security. And then it is necessary to do what we didn’t do in the sixties; we have to defend our positions in ways that respect the emotional and intellectual commitments of our fellow citizens. So: we oppose this war, but would fight whenever necessary to defend our country. We favor resource transfers to the global poor, but insist on a decent welfare system here at home. We oppose torture because America was founded on a rejection of “cruel and unusual punishment.” We are dissidents and internationalists, yes, but committed at the same time to American well-being.
For all of us who were part of it, the left upsurge in the 1960s, the politics of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, was wonderfully exciting. It brought large numbers of men and women, mostly young men and women, into a life of political engagement (and many of us are still engaged). It changed American culture for the better in many ways. But it did not produce a sustainable politics; its institutional legacy is virtually nil. In fact, it contributed to forty years of rightward momentum that, only now, is there any prospect of stopping. Next time, we have to do better.
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