Essay: THE NEW RADICALS

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Some see the Federal Government as the chief source of all the necessary funds—though they detest the government and, with almost states'-righters' fervor, would curb the federal role in society. Here, as well as in its hostility toward liberals, is where the New Left joins the New Right, including the Young Americans for Freedom (membership: 30,000). They both distrust big government, want to curb its interference in local and private affairs. Individual spokesmen for both right and left have even suggested abolishing the draft, though for very different reasons. (Some New Leftists want to eliminate armies altogether.) They both favor voluntary activities, including private or neighborhood-controlled education, police and social services. But there are differences. The New Left thinks of the poor as victims and believes that the conservatives think of them only as failures. The New Leftists have a mystical faith in the purity and wisdom of the poor, "uncorrupted" by the Establishment—an idea that the New Right rejects as nonsense.

The New Leftists resemble Russia's 19th century narodniks (populists), mostly middle-class students, who idealized the peasants and went to live among them, trying to rouse them to action. The overriding dream of the New Left is "participatory democracy," which means, among other things, that workers should have a vote on the running of their plants, students on what they should be taught, and the poor (as long as there are any) on welfare programs. To make this possible, life must center on small communities, cities must be broken up. Scratch Utopia and you find nostalgia: the New Leftists really look backward, to a time of small social units and close personal relations. With yearnings for an almost medieval setting, they want to repeal bigness—which some men have been hankering to do ever since the Industrial Revolution. In News from Nowhere, William Morris visualized a new London broken up into idyllic villages. Charles Fourier and Robert Owen envisioned small, self-sufficient communities, inspiring such American Utopian experiments as Brook Farm and New Harmony. Sometimes the New Left's vision sounds like New Harmony-computerized. Says James Weinstein, an editor of Studies on the Left: "People will meet in little communities and decide what they want. All their desires will be fed into the computers, which will pass their needs on to the industries." Many of the New Left's current projects are surprisingly small-scale, such as the "free universities" and other "parallel institutions" which it has improvised as alternatives to existing ones. Hayden lists his top aims as "rent control, play streets, apartment repairs, higher welfare payments, jobs."