Below is my column in The Hill on the rise of American armchair revolutionaries, particularly among young, affluent college graduates. It is part of the “radical chic” fostered from higher education to Hollywood for citizens who have no memory of the failures of socialism and communism in the 20th Century.
Editor: Mr. Turley seems to be not just out of touch, but a purveyor of shopworn ignorance! In sum he presents Wolfe as a truth teller, rather than social critic with certain verifiable prejudices, that read like leftovers from 1970 !
Editor: some selective quotations from this essay are instructive!
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Sometime in December, Kempton, at the suggestion of the Panthers’ lawyers, asked some well-connected and respectable friends who have a town house on the East Side whether they would arrange an evening at home to raise money for the Panthers’ defense. Not only were the defendants desperately poor, but Kempton felt it important that their situation be publicized; for, as he wrote at the time, “If they cannot be saved from being tried as strangers, they have no chance to be tried fairly at all.” Liberal New Yorkers are quick to respond to such appeals, especially where civil liberties appear to be in jeopardy. Furthermore, the Panthers had by this time gained a certain interest—not to say glamour—as the authentic voice of black misery and rage. One tended to hear in their violent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied it not the sound of revolution but the cry of pain. What liberals found most interesting and hopeful about the Panthers were their efforts to supply dignity and political direction to black street people. Their talk of violent revolution, their identification with third world political leaders, and even the weapons they carried seemed, by contrast, largely rhetoric and theater.
To many liberals it also appeared that the Panthers were right to claim that federal and local officials were out to destroy them. Attorney General Mitchell had begun to talk of preventive detention. Fred Hampton, the Illinois Panther leader, had been shot in his bed by a posse of Chicago police, and Bobby Seale, the national chairman, had been bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial for having repeatedly demanded no more than his constitutional right to defend himself. Moreover, evidence of the torture and murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven—a crime with which Seale had also been charged, to which two Panthers had already confessed, and for which a third was later to be found guilty—had not yet been made public; nor had any other evidence of Panther violence been produced, including whatever evidence Hogan might have had against the New York Panthers. In any case, what was on Kempton’s mind was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants but the need to raise money for their defense and to make them visible.
Thus Kempton’s friends sent out their invitations. About forty people came, including Felicia Bernstein, wife of the conductor. The Panthers who addressed these guests were articulate and calm. Their problems were obviously genuine. They talked about their breakfast program for ghetto children and said nothing to suggest that they were terrorists. They did, however, insist that they were revolutionaries, an admission that did not deter Mrs. Bernstein from agreeing to arrange a similar meeting at her own house some two weeks hence. Soon thereafter she sent elegantly engraved invitations, in her name but not in her husband’s, to perhaps a hundred people who might be interested in the case. Meanwhile, Charlotte Curtis, the society reporter for The New York Times, who had been in touch with Kempton on other matters, learned of his interest in the Panthers and said she would like to write a piece on their wives. Kempton thought this would be useful to the defendants and suggested that she come along to the Bernsteins’ party.
Tom Wolfe was another guest whom Mrs. Bernstein had not herself invited, but who came anyway. The present book is the result of his visit.
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Editor:
God!” Bernstein interrupts Cox at one point in the evening, “most of the people in this room have had a problem being wanted.” To Wolfe this statement is laughable. Bernstein, he says, “has steered the Black Panther movement into a 1955 Jules Feiffer cartoon. Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis…,” etc. This misses the point. To be wanted is hardly a psychoanalytic cliché. It is an absolute spiritual necessity—for the Panthers, for the Bernsteins, and for everyone in between. The point that Wolfe misses and that Bernstein spontaneously grasped is that what we all fear is to be abandoned not simply in an indifferent and purposeless universe, but in our indifferent, purposeless, and ungoverned cities.
The prospect is not bright. According to Gibbon, when the Romans of the second century learned that their empire was waning and that their familiar gods could no longer be trusted, only a few kept their heads. Most hastened to attach their faith to whichever substitutes came their way. The result eventually was Christianity. For Americans there appears to be no such likely replacement for the faith we once had in ourselves. Some take drugs, others call the police. For most there is nothing left to do but try to pretend that things are the same, and to blame their anxiety on the failures or conspiracies of others. Such paranoia is the common refuge of a frightened people. Crises of faith are hard to bear. As therapy, delusion may seem preferable to truth. On the other hand, reality cannot be denied for long, nor does a flag on the lapel restore our lost democracy.
Yet even in such times as these, there remains a choice of action. We may blame others for our misfortunes and confront our problems with benign neglect, hoping that they will go away by themselves, or, like Felicia Bernstein and Barbara Walters, we may ask, seriously and with compassion, if anything can still be done.
Tom Wolfe’s view of things to come is darker yet. At the end of his essay he has a vision. There is a concert. Bernstein is conducting. The audience consists of
…fools, boors, philistines, Birchers, B’nai Brithees, Defense Leaguers, theatre party piranhas, UJAviators, concert hall Irishmen, Wasp ignorati, toads, newspaper readers—they were booing him—Leonard Bernstein—Boooooooooo. That harebrained story in the Times had told how he and Felicia had given a party for the Black Panthers and how he had pledged a conducting fee for their defense fund, and now stretching out before him in New York, was a great, starched, white-throated audience of secret candy store bigots, greengrocers, Moshe Dayans with patches over both eyes. Booooooo Boooooooo it was unbelievable. But it was real—he was their whipping boy and a bunch of $14.50 cretins were booing him and it was an insomniac hallucination in the loneliness of 3 AM.
Of course Wolfe can only have imagined that this was Bernstein’s dream. Though such a concert did take place soon after the editorial appeared in the Times and Bernstein was, in fact, booed, the terrible vision, with all its hatred and violence, its fear and disgust, is Wolfe’s own and in his authentic voice. The terrified conductor, the howling mob, the forgotten music may indeed be our future, as Wolfe seems to be saying. Still, we may hope that his perception in this particular is as faulty as it is generally.
Editor: Note the bad political actor in the Turley diatribe is Zohran Mamdani! The Neo-Cons and The New Democrats are in a panic over the Mamdani election. And to this the fact that Tueley was 9 in 1970, so his acquaintanceship with Wolfe’s diatribe is historical, rather that contemporaneous: I recall it vividly !
Editor: Mr. Turley refuses to acnowledge that The Rebellion Against The Elites continues!
Latte Leninist, “radical chic”, Marxism-lite, Young Democratic Socialists of America, [boycott-divestment-sanctions against Israel],
Marxism coming to America, young people for socialism and even communism, radical shifts to socialism in Great Britain and France destroyed their economies,
Notably, most of Mamdani’s proposals would violate the Constitution or bankrupt the city,
Such considerations are rarely raised, let alone resolved, in radical conferences, She added, “it’s our responsibility as people who are within the United States to go as hard as possible to decolonize this place because that will reverberate all across the world.
Lenin once mocked many in the West as idiots who would “transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind [and] toil to prepare their own suicide.” What he never imagined was how some would still be transforming themselves decades after the revolution failed.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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