The Young Radicals: A Symposium

What makes me identify as a radical is the conviction that something new must be added to the American calculus of goods and bads, rights and wrongs. I have an uneasy sense of a whole nation skating lightly over a cracking shell of rationalization and denial, even when there really is a firmer ground to stand on. To the extent that Americans have achieved a good society, they have done so in a curiously inarticulate fashion, celebrating what is trivial and even negative, and missing what really makes this country more livable than any other on earth. America is like the inarticulate, mumbling hero of its modern drama, tragically unable to discover its own saving qualities in time to avoid a meaningless and wasteful end. As a student of h...