Letters to a Young Activist
by Todd Gitlin
Basic Books

Among possible models for a how-to guide to the New New Left, Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" makes a curious choice. Each year, countless alienated collegiate poets flock to the book, seeking solace from the burdens of their fragile sophistication. They find what they need: an apology not for beauty, but for the beauty of narcissism as creativity. Quoth the poet:

Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.

Activism? Yes, but not of a sort particularly driven toward the establishment of a living wage or universal health care. Fortunately, both for his own lyrical capacity and for his politics generally, Todd Gitlin does not mimic Rilke in "Letters to a Young Activist." In fact, the message contained is nearly the opposite: activism at its root consists of going outside of one's self. Rilke advised his young interlocutor to confront the pallor of absolute isolation with the glow of uniqueness; Gitlin encourages his readers to think of causes greater then themselves, and put their thoughts into action with like-minded people. The existentialists had a word for this: engagement. Here we have something a little more banal:

Openness is one of your virtues, built into your kind of practical intelligence. The activist spirit saves you from dourness, coldness, desperation — from the habit forming victim mentality in all its self-fulfilling dread. You're always looking for opportunities. Fortitude works in your favor, but another quality of the activist spirit lends you fortitude ... This is the taste for adventure, which I think must be a quality of your being.

And so on. A dash of the "Port Huron Statement," a sprinkle of "Tuesdays with Morrie," a healthy serving of earnestness and, voila: "Letters to a Young Activist." It is as much Gitlin's mea culpa as his "My Way," a variety of strategies on how to avoid idealizing the '60s, how to respond to antisemitism and anti-Americanism on the left, how to control identity politics, and how not to, under any circumstances, vote for Ralph Nader.

Truth be told, it makes for an occasionally gripping read, no doubt because Gitlin spent most of his youth immersed in the protest culture — he prefers "movement" — and as a past leader of Students for a Democratic Society, he is in a unique position to explain how his movement came to achieve greatness and inspire backlash in equal measure. He makes a convincing case that image of the movement in the popular imagination — on television and film particularly — fails to do it justice:

This black-and-white diagram is simplistic and seriously distorted. It's predicated on a melodramatic tale about those far gone and glorious sixties when moral seriousness entailed spontaneous action and street fighters stalked the land ... During most of the sixties, idealism was nowhere near universal. Movement earnestness and longing were conspicuous by contrast with the more extensive vogue of hard practicality. At Kennedy-era Harvard, for example, we not-very-embarrassed idealists were greatly outnumbered by the unembarrassable realists under the tutelage of Henry Kissinger, think-tankers in training, who, when they didn't despise us for our softness, condescended to us that we had no idea how the world worked.

The grinning avatar of '60s realism is McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's National Security Advisor, who responds to Gitlin and his fellow protestors with R.A. Butler's rejoinder: "Politics is the art of the possible." Of course, for Bundy, the possible included the deaths of one million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans in Southeast Asia in an attempt to win an abominable war. For Gitlin, it was Bundy who saddled "realism with a reputation for unreality ... sending Democratic politics into an abyss."

Abyss may be somewhat of an understatement. Much of Gitlin's book heaps praise on the achievements of the movement: the struggle for Civil Rights, against apartheid, against Vietnam and for nuclear disarmament. But the author hardly hides his disappointment with what the New Left became. Its factionalism, its violence, and its inability accept the mantle of power undermined the movement and its moral principles. So much so that Gitlin spends a bit too much time lecturing on how to keep your anti-globalization protests free of the anarchist riff-raff: "If you don't like the freeloaders who hijack your events as backdrops for their spectacular riots, don't let sentimentality stand in your way," he admonishes. "Make it clear — to them and to the public — that you don't welcome intruders who violate your principles."

The question for all activists remains the same: What are you acting for? In a book dedicated to preaching to the choir, some crucial specifics get lost, and, while the left wanders in the wilderness of the Bush years, those specifics may yet make the difference. "I know how it feels when your nerve endings go out to the Salvadorian coffee picker, the Bangladeshi textile worker, the battered wife, the displaced peasant, the unemployed steel worker ..." Gitlin writes. Surely these examples represent a reasonable stand against exploitation, an ideal since the days of Marx and Engels. But what else should his readers stand for? Gitlin leaves his young activists to come up with these reasons on their own.

It gets worse. The left is less disciplined than the right, Gitlin informs us, and, reading his description of the "bright line" connecting the John Birchers and Young Americans for Freedom and the Christian right and Ronald Reagan, it's a point well taken. "The Left stands for hanging loose, the Right for tight control. The Left is Bohemia, the Right is headquarters," he adds, while acknowledging that Oscar Wilde hits from the other side: "The problem with socialism is that it would take too many evenings." There goes the aesthete wing of the party.

Activism alone will not reverse this state of affairs, nor will Gitlin's slight book bring about, on its own, a sequel to the quasi-revolutionary moment he eulogizes. The left is listless today because it has no ideology around which it can coalesce, and Gitlin, averse to thinking in ideological terms, does not offer anything in the way of a solution to this problem. Aristotle said that every action tends toward a good. What good activism hopes to achieve is as important as whether there are activists; to practice the art of the possible, we need first to decide what possibility will mean for an American left in decline. If not, we can be sure our actions will be taken in vain.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)