In 1952, a year after I was born and a decade and a half before I became an active participant on the American left, Daniel Bell published a book called Marxian Socialism in America, the first serious scholarly examination of the subject. He considered, among other questions, why the traditional Marxist parties in the United States had by then descended into abject political isolation. The Socialist Party of America (SP), which four decades earlier had enrolled over a hundred thousand members and attracted nearly a million voters in the presidential election of 1912, was reduced to less than a thousand aging stalwarts by 1952; its youth affiliate, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), had fewer than a hundred. Further to the left (or to the east, given its affinity for the Soviet Union), the Communist Party, USA (CP) still counted roughly twenty thousand members, but many of its leaders were imprisoned or about to be imprisoned for violation of the Smith Act, a federal law making it a crime to conspire to teach or advocate the desirability of overthrowing the government. According to public opinion polls in the early 1950s, a clear majority of Americans believed that the Party should be outlawed entirely.
Bell, who had joined YPSL at the age of thirteen in the early 1930s, and who in the first election in which he was eligible to do so voted for Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, now concluded that the American Marxists of all persuasions had been destined for failure from the beginning, their fate “rooted in [an] inability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics”:
The socialist movement . . . in its rejection of the capitalist order as a whole, could not relate itself to the specific problems of social action in the here-and-now, give-and-take political world. It was trapped by the unhappy problem of living “in but not of the world,” so it could only act, and then inadequately, as the moral, but not political man in immoral society. . . . A religious movement can split its allegiances and live in but not of the world . . . ; a political movement can not.
Bell continued in later years to describe himself as a socialist in economics if not in political allegiances, and his verdict was delivered in a regretful tone, at least in regard to the Socialist Party’s fate. In any case, from the perspective of the early 1950s, it would have been hard to disagree with his judgment that the Marxist left’s moment as a meaningful player in American political life had come and gone.
Fast forward a dozen years to 1964, when I turned thirteen, the age that Daniel Bell was when he joined the socialist movement more than three decades earlier. This was also a coming-of-age moment for me, as I first began paying attention to what was happening in the broader world outside of family, neighborhood, and school. In that year’s presidential election, I was a fierce (if still eight-years-under-the-voting-age) partisan of the candidacy of the Democratic incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson, and took great satisfaction in his trouncing of his arch-conservative rival Barry Goldwater in November. But something else caught my attention in 1964 that was destined to have a lasting impact on my political trajectory: a sub-drama within the Democratic camp playing out in Mississippi. There, from June through August, about a thousand young civil rights volunteers from around the country were taking part in the Freedom Summer Project directed by a remarkable twenty-nine-year-old activist named Bob Moses, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the risk of their own lives (three would be kidnapped and murdered by the Klan at the very start of the project), the volunteers conducted a voter registration drive among the disenfranchised black population, and helped organize a new political formation called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the regular and staunchly white-supremacist Democratic Party in the state.
At summer’s end, the MFDP sent an integrated delegation of Mississippi residents to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white regular delegates. Although President Johnson had overseen passage of the Civil Rights Act earlier in the year, fearful of losing the state and perhaps the entire south to Goldwater he dispatched a crew of established liberal and civil rights leaders to persuade the insurgent Mississippians to give up their challenge. In exchange, they were promised that the MFDP would be awarded two at-large delegates to the convention, along with the assurance that by 1968 all Democratic state delegations would then and thereafter be required to be open to black as well as white delegates. From the perspective of realpolitik, or what Bell would describe as the necessity of acting as “political man in an immoral society,” it was not an unreasonable offer. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was among those initially urging the MFDP delegates to accept it. Yet the MFDP delegates refused to do so. As Bob Moses declared, after King had spoken in favor of compromise, “This reasoning you’ve been giving us here is inaccurate. We’re not here to bring politics into our morality, but to bring morality into our politics.”
To bring morality into our politics: this was something new in mid-twentieth-century American major party politics, where compromise and consensus, defined as accepting the recognition that you were not going to get everything you initially asked for, were considered the fundamental rules of the game. Some things, the MFDP delegates decided, were not up for compromise, such as their claim to full and equal rights as citizens in the United States. Theirs was an example of the “in but not of the world” stance that, just a dozen years earlier, Bell had described as leading to inevitable political irrelevance. And yet, in this instance, it worked. Less than a year later, building on the uncompromising groundwork laid by Freedom Summer, the MFDP credentials challenge at Atlantic City, and the Selma voting rights campaign of the following spring, Congress enacted a Voting Rights Act signed into law by President Johnson that would transform southern politics. And in 1968 some MFDP alumni would be seated at that year’s Chicago Democratic convention as members of the official Mississippi state delegation.
Of course, unlike the radicals Bell was analyzing back in 1952, Bob Moses was not a Marxist. Nor, apart from some Red Diaper babies (that is, children of Communists), were most of the Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964. Their political outlook, including their insistence on a morally driven politics that refused to compromise basic principles, came out of a different and older tradition in American radicalism. It stretched back to Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century insisting on her right to question the authority of the colony’s Puritan ministers based on what she described as direct revelations from God. (For this she was branded an “antinomian” by both the political and religious establishments.)
A similar commitment to what in the nineteenth century was called obedience to a “Higher Law” was central to what was seen at the time as the wildly irresponsible demand for the “immediate” end of slavery by the abolitionist movement, as it was shaped by leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Later still in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries this same uncompromising morality-infused radicalism could be found in the women’s suffrage movement, represented by such figures as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul. This American radical tradition also had some influence within the Marxist left, most notably on Eugene Debs, who read his Marx and Engels and believed in class struggle and international working-class solidarity, but whose aspirations for the American cooperative commonwealth were based on the moral principles about democratic citizenship and individual conscience that he had imbibed as a young man growing up in Terre Haute. “Despite his Socialism,” Debs’ biographer Nick Salvatore argued, “a fierce individualism fueled his core vision,” evident in his most famous speech. In 1918, upon being convicted in federal court of speaking out against American entry into the First World War, he declared:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth . . . While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Time and again in the history of the United States, outsiders to the political mainstream, raising what were regarded as unreasonable demands and speaking in a moral vernacular that owed much to that antinomian strain of American Protestantism, brought to the fore issues such as slavery, women’s rights, and opposition to war that found few if any supporters in more conventional political circles. The role of this left-wing prophetic minority, which Daniel Bell did not sufficiently appreciate, is part of a vital political tradition that has over the centuries enhanced the freedoms and opportunities of millions of Americans. It is a tradition that I consider worth honoring and emulating — so long as one recognizes that it has also led on occasion to unforeseen and less inspiring outcomes.
17-year-old Bonnie Raitt, and beside her the then 16-year-old author, American Friends Service Committee project volunteers, Indianapolis, July 1967.
When I turned sixteen in the spring of 1967, I was a high school junior living in a small town in rural Connecticut, desperately anticipating graduation the following year, and with it the opportunity to move away to a big city to attend college. With a Quaker mother and a Jewish father, coming of age in a community where what passed for ethnic diversity ran the gamut from Yankee Protestant to Irish Catholic, my early desire to fit in with my neighbors and classmates gave way sometime post-puberty to an even stronger desire to escape the whole lot of them, and in doing so lay claim to a new sense of independence. Identifying entirely with the heroic selflessness of students taking part in the Freedom Summer project (some of whom also went on in the fall of 1964 to play leading roles in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement), my otherwise conventional adolescent rebellion took on an increasingly political edge. Of course, those history-making freedom struggles were happening so far away from my tedious isolation in Coventry, Connecticut that they may as well have been set on Middle Earth (it was about this time I also was immersing myself in the paperback edition of Lord of the Rings).
But in 1967, with the advent of anti-Vietnam war protests in cities relatively nearby, my life changed in ways that felt most welcome, adventurous, and authentic. In mid-April I took the train to New York City to join in the “Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam,” a demonstration called by a recently assembled coalition of radical, pacifist, and student groups, which proved to be the most massive anti-war gathering to that point in American history. Back home, nobody in my high school or community seemed to be against the bloody and unjust and unwinnable war in Vietnam but me. (My parents had their doubts, but prudently kept them to themselves.) But when I reached Sheep Meadow in Central Park on the morning of April 15, I no longer felt quite so lonely. With a quarter of a million other protesters, I marched downtown to a rally at the United Nations building. There, surrounded by my newfound fellowship (no elves, dwarves, or hobbits involved, but lots of students and hippies, as well as veterans, trade unionists, and other grown-ups), I listened intently to speeches by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and, most memorably, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He was not calling for compromise this time. “Let no one claim there is a consensus for this war,” he said as he began his remarks. “No flag-waving, no smug satisfaction with territorial conquest, no denunciation of the enemy can obscure the truth that many millions of Americans repudiate this war and refuse to take moral responsibility for it.” Maybe not King’s greatest speech and certainly not his best-remembered one, but it spoke to me then and continues to do so today, as part of the great American radical tradition that we now call “speaking truth to power,” as exemplified
by Garrison, Douglass, Stanton, Paul, Debs, Moses, and
King himself.
I spent the summer that followed in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana, one of a group of teenage volunteers enrolled in an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) project. An aspiring seventeen-year-old folksinger named Bonnie Raitt, bound for Radcliffe, and then for greater things, was among our number. Working with a local settlement house, we did various good works in the community, while learning about poverty, race, and the Quaker vision of conscience-driven social change. (Our texts ranged from Michael Harrington’s The Other America to Malcolm X’s Autobiography to Richard Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence.) Bonnie and I and our compatriots organized a silent vigil in downtown Indianapolis on Hiroshima Day to protest the war, to the discomfort of the adult project leaders who were worried about hostile local reaction. (If they had preferred we stayed home that day, they should not have assigned us Gregg’s book.) By summer’s end, under the influence of Dr. King and the Quakers, I considered myself a committed pacifist, and what’s more — with the success of our little vigil — an organizer.
That fall, a senior in high school, still short of my seventeenth birthday, I traveled from New York City with my Uncle Abe and Aunt Joan to Washington, D.C., to take part in the March on the Pentagon on October 21, organized by the same coalition of anti-war groups that had staged the Spring Mobilization. Although not a “Red Diaper Baby,” I did grow up knowing that people to whom I was related and respected had indeed been members of the Communist Party back in the years of the Great Depression — and some, like my father’s brother Abe, remained so. In fact, he had been one of the lawyers for the eleven Communist leaders convicted in 1949 for violating the Smith Act, and like the defendants he also went to jail, in his case for contempt of court. Despite his continuing allegiance to the Communist cause, he scrupulously refrained from trying to recruit me to his own corner of the organized Left (which, in any case, seemed to me too old and stodgy for serious consideration), but was happy to encourage my growing radical inclinations, wherever they led me.
I had never been to Washington before, but sightseeing was not on our agenda — it would be years before I had the occasion to travel to the nation’s capital without attending a protest of some kind or another. We stayed in a downtown hotel, and on the morning of the march we joined the mass and legal part of the day’s protest, with about a hundred thousand people attending the rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Afterwards we marched across the Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who by then had his own private doubts about the war he was so instrumental in launching and escalating) was nervously looking out the window of his upper-story office at the gathering crowd. When we got there, I impulsively decided to part company with my uncle and aunt and ran with a group of other young participants past surprised lines of military police to the very steps of the building. Totally unplanned, this was my first venture into militant but non-violent civil disobedience, which I imagine was the case for most of the rest of the few thousand protesters who now found themselves hemmed in by soldiers and federal marshals. There, at the steps of the Pentagon, we listened to impassioned speeches against the war, chanted anti-war slogans — and did not, contrary to subsequent accusations, spit on anybody. Mostly, astonished at our proximity to the planning center and symbol of an evil and unjust war, we wondered what would happen next. In my case, the answer came shortly before dusk, when a burly federal marshal pulled my feet out from under me and dragged me roughly down the adjacent embankment before depositing me on the pavement of the Pentagon’s north parking lot. I picked myself up and limped back across the bridge connecting Arlington to Washington. All in all, I thought it had been the best day of my life.
Among the speakers I remember listening to that afternoon at the Pentagon was a young Swarthmore College graduate named Cathy Wilkerson, then working as a regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Washington, D.C. Many years later I read Flying Close to the Sun, her memoir of the years she spent as a radical activist in the New Left. She began the decade of the 1960s as a Quaker and an admirer of Gandhi, and she ended it as a fugitive in the Weather Underground. When I encountered her in 1967, she was half-way through that unfortunate transition, but some part of the earlier Quaker influences apparently lingered. She urged us that afternoon not to take unnecessary risks. “While I had been excited by Debray and Fanon,” she recalled, “here in the heat of confrontation it was the model of the non-violent confrontations of the civil rights movement that seemed most powerful. To the extent we had any power at the Pentagon, which didn’t feel like much, it was the power of a moral witness.”
Wilkerson’s life story is, among other things, a cautionary case study of how even the best instincts can sometimes lead to terrible outcomes. The emphasis in the early civil rights movement of “putting your body on the line,” as in the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides on 1961, took on a darker meaning for some activists by the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Wilkerson’s case, it led to the “townhouse explosion” of 1970, which left three of her bomb-building comrades dead in the rubble of her father’s expensive Greek Revival home in Greenwich Village, while she stumbled out of the wreckage and took flight into the underground.
Wilkerson’s memoir provides an illuminating glimpse into the fatal trajectory of the largest radical student movement in American history. I find her particularly astute in describing the internal dynamics of SDS in 1968–1969, the year I joined as a freshman at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (having finally realized my ambition of escaping small town life). I was part of a flood of new recruits to SDS, pushing its numbers that academic year to the vicinity of a hundred thousand strong. “This infusion of young people,” Wilkerson wrote in her memoir, “drawn in more by culture than politics, was becoming the norm” in SDS: “They weren’t looking for a complicated discussion about how to bring about change, but for validation, for community, and for a way to express their anger about the war.”
That seems exactly right in my memory of the moment: validation, community, anger, all understandable reasons for joining a radical movement. Embracing left-wing causes, historically, has not been restricted to “a complicated discussion” about either abstract ideals or political strategy. It also often includes, especially for young people who provide the majority of converts to such causes, the forging of a new personal identity, as Wilkerson — and my own example — suggest. What matters is how motivation and spirit that goes into shaping that self-redefinition is then channeled.
A similar insight from an earlier generation comes from another memoir, Starting Out in the Thirties by Alfred Kazin, which I read while writing a senior thesis at Reed on the history of Communist-organized literary groups in the Depression decade. “History was going our way,” Kazin wrote of his own youthful attraction to the radical Left (and briefly Communism) in those years:
Everything in the outside world seemed to be moving towards some final decision, for by now the Spanish Civil War had begun, and every day felt choked with struggle. It was as if the planet had locked in combat . . . There seemed to be no division between my effort at personal liberation, and the apparent effort of humanity to deliver itself. Reading Silone and Malraux, discovering the Beethoven string quartets and having love affairs were part of the great pattern in Spain, in the Valley of the Ebro, in the Salinas Valley in California . . . Wherever I went now I felt the moral contagion of a single idea.
Substitute Vietnam for Spain, and, perhaps, the White Album for the Beethoven string quartets (we weren’t quite as attuned to high culture as Kazin’s generation of young Jewish intellectuals thirty years earlier), and that pretty much sums up my own sense of historical destiny in my year in SDS. I don’t know if “contagion” is quite the right word, but even though I and most of the Reed SDS chapter avoided the temptation to follow Cathy Wilkerson into the violent and radical Weather underground, student revolutionary politics in 1968–1969 did, at times, have a feverish quality.
Thinking back on those years, the problem was not so much that I had a “single idea” governing my political choices (and certainly not “Communism” as it would have been recognized by a veteran of the 1930s); rather, I had too many contradictory and muddled ideas, which in my youth and inexperience I found impossible to sort out. Like Wilkerson that day at the Pentagon a year earlier, I was still partially under the sway of the Quaker ideal of “moral witness” as espoused in Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence. But I was also attracted to the in-your-face confrontational politics being pushed in New Left Notes, SDS’s weekly newsletter. The ideal of non-violent “moral witness” was giving way to the vague but not necessarily non-violent ideal of “resistance.” I remember sometime that fall reading The Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of SDS, written (largely) by Tom Hayden in 1962, calling for the creation of a left with genuine intellectual skills, and being entirely persuaded. But also, that same fall in 1968, I read his essay in the radical monthly magazine Ramparts called “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” celebrating the strike at Columbia University the previous April, and essentially dismissing higher education in the United States as a wholly owned subsidiary of the war machine, which, he implied, did not deserve to survive. I found that equally persuasive. In sum, I was confused, an intellectual mess. I found wisdom in the works of Lenin and in the works of Lennon (and McCartney, Harrison, and Starr). I somehow believed in all these things simultaneously, and that they all went nicely together. I failed, or refused, to notice any contradictions.
The author, age 20, at an anti-war protest in Portland, Oregon, 1971 (photo by Michael Kazin).
As Wilkerson noted, my cohort of young radicals had few fixed political ideas beyond opposing the Vietnam War. And that sentiment, completely justifiable in itself, could lead in any number of directions, some entirely sensible and decent, including marches and vigils, draft resistance and other forms of peaceful civil disobedience — or, in Wilkerson’s case, to her embrace of lethal terrorism. “People make their own history,” as Marx famously observed, “but not under conditions of their own choosing.” I hardly mean to excuse poor choices made by Wilkerson, or myself, or others at the time — but it does suggest why so many individual actors tended to make worse choices at the end of the 1960s than, at an equivalent age, they might have made eight or nine years earlier.
SDS’s evolution in the course of the 1960s resembled a streetcar that, depending on the year you climbed aboard, carried you where it would with no fixed route. Had I been old enough to climb aboard in SDS’s early days, from 1962 to 1965, our destination, at least in the short run, would have been what the Port Huron Statement had described as a “participatory democracy,” our chief activity supporting the southern civil rights movement. Climbing aboard in 1968, however, in the midst of an ever-escalating and ever more destructive war in Vietnam, plus domestic warfare in the streets of Newark, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., SDS’s destination was transformed into the revolutionary transformation of, well, everything — the details a little vague, to be achieved through means that were not clear, but in my imagination bore some resemblance to Paris, May ’68, if only American streets were lined with cobblestones. I could have gone either way, and looking back I much prefer the former to the latter destination. But instead, I climbed aboard the streetcar in what proved SDS’s final calamitous year.
I did learn some valuable lessons in the late 1960s and early 1970s that, when the dust had settled, informed my subsequent career as a historian exploring the fate of twentieth-century American radicalism. Between 1982 and 2000 I published four books on the history of the American left, and then a fifth, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, this past year. If I were to summarize the thesis of that latest effort, it boils down to a single sentence in the book’s preface, arguing that the Communist movement “attracted egalitarian idealists, and bred authoritarian zealots.” Although I was never a Communist as such — I was too much immersed in the counterculture of the era to go that route — I have to confess there is at least a little submerged autobiography informing that thesis.
The lessons I learned in the late 1960s also informed my own subsequent political choices. In 1982, the year my first book came out, I was a founding member of a new left-wing group, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA’s most influential figure was Michael Harrington, who I had first encountered as an authority on poverty back in that formative summer of 1967. DSA, in Harrington’s vision, would strive to be “the left wing of the possible.” By that he meant that it should devote itself to building the broadest possible coalition of progressive groups within and alongside the Democratic Party, including the labor, feminist, environmental, and civil rights movements. Along with its socialist aspirations, DSA was thus firmly committed to “relate itself to the specific problems of social action in the here-and-now, give-and-take political world,” to borrow Bell’s formula (although Bell, by then describing his own politics as neo-conservative, had no interest in Harrington’s project). DSAers also laid equal stress on both words in the organization’s name, combining an absolute commitment to democracy as well as socialism, in the United States and internationally. Given my experience with the crack-up of the New Left a decade earlier, which led to SDS’s splintering in 1969 into a host of competing would-be revolutionary vanguards, I found DSA’s pragmatism and its democratic principles reassuring. No more charging down blind adventurous alleys for me, literally or figuratively, thank you very much.
The author, age 31 in 1982, the year he joined Democratic Socialists of America, (Photo by David Weintraub.)
Over the next three decades, DSA’s membership hovered between five and ten thousand, making it the largest socialist group on the American left, but one that was unable to attract sizeable numbers of new (and younger) recruits in the years between the Reagan and the George W. Bush administrations, and so played at best a minor role in the nation’s politics. Harrington died in 1989 of cancer at the age of sixty-one, and no one of comparable public stature (and intellectual skill) replaced him as a widely recognized symbol of what it meant to be a democratic socialist.
And then, unexpectedly as these things tend to happen, new opportunities arose. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist (although not a DSA member), ran a spirited campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and attracted many younger voters to his cause. That was followed two years later by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress — a young woman of color with extraordinary political skills, who proudly proclaimed her own DSA affiliation. People, especially young people, began to Google this unfamiliar term, “democratic socialism,” and up popped the DSA website. By the early 2020s, forty-four percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine reported positive views of socialism, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. (Unfortunately Pew failed to ask what they mean by socialism. Probably not Soviet-era Communism.) As a result, and in some ways comparable to the boost that SDS experienced in the mid-1960s driven by the escalation of the war in Vietnam, DSA underwent an enormous expansion in membership, peaking at over ninety thousand by 2020.
Most of those new members were in their twenties, with a lot of enthusiasm, energy, and raw political talent, organizing chapters in cities and states across the country that had not seen an active socialist presence since the Debsian era. Soon scores of DSA members, running as Democrats, had won election to state legislatures, city councils, and other offices. By January 2021 there were four DSA members sitting in Congress, more socialists than had ever served in that body at the same time. Harrington’s “left-wing of the possible” was really happening, at long last. Or so it seemed.
But in keeping with the history of the modern American left, DSA’s future trajectory and prospects would prove neither uncomplicated nor untroubled. Two factors began to tug the organization in a very different direction politically from its earlier identity. The first was that, like those of us who came of age in the 1960s, the younger radicals now pouring into the organization, who soon vastly outnumbered DSA veterans, were impatient with their elders. In the early 1960s Michael Harrington had served for a few years as a mentor and role model to Tom Hayden and other SDSers, but by the latter part of the decade was either regarded as a sell-out by my generation of SDSers or forgotten entirely. “Perhaps it is inevitable,” he observed ruefully in 1967, “that young people come to the radical movement with the fervor of catechumens,” that is, converts to the Faith preparing for confirmation in the early Church, “and always believe that the veterans of past struggles are tired and going soft.” So it proved in DSA. By 2019 or so, “Harringtonite” was becoming a term of abuse within the organization (although no one I knew in DSA ever labeled themselves as such — cults of personality were never a particular feature of democratic socialism).
DSA’s years of maximum growth were also, significantly, years of despair rather than hope on the left, coinciding with Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the subsequent four years of his dystopian presidency. Those four years climaxed with the killing of George Floyd in 2020. To many of the young people joining the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that ensued, their nation seemed stained with the sin of absolute and irredeemable racism, not unlike the way it seemed to abolitionists in the 1850s and New Leftists in the later 1960s.
It might be useful here to think back on the events that took place in Atlantic City in August 1964, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party rejected the compromise offered them by prominent liberals, and chose instead to be ruled entirely by their principles. They were right to do so. But that moment had other, more protracted, and unintended consequences, especially for young radicals, as Bob Moses’ biographer Eric Burner argued in his perceptive account, And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi: “In giving compromise a bad name the maneuvering of the liberals at Atlantic City . . . contributed to a mentality, increasingly aggressive in the years that followed, that purity is to be measured by how many people the pure refuse to cooperate with . . . It was purity of a sort that has since come to define the later sixties, at once fortifying and destructive.”
At once fortifying and destructive. What is fortifying for the already persuaded does not necessarily build bridges to those who still need persuading — quite the opposite. That tendency for “purity . . . to be measured by how many people the pure refuse to cooperate with” can be considered historically the Achilles’ heel of the antinomian tradition of American radicalism. All too often in recent decades, those on the American Left — and this is especially true on campuses, among faculty as well as students — seem to be engaged in a competition among themselves to demonstrate that they have individually arrived at a state of political grace, as measured by the ability to deploy ever more esoteric language and the embrace of ever more marginal niche issues. Failure to attract supporters outside the core group of believers can then be attributed to backsliding within the congregation, a morally satisfying but politically self-defeating habit. And seen in this light, Bell’s point about the political problems of “living in but not of the world” is not without insight. What worked in Atlantic City in 1964 decidedly did not work in the streets of Chicago in 1968, or in the Weather Underground in the years that followed. Or in too many left-wing circles today.
The other factor complicating DSA’s future was that not all of the organization’s recruits were twenty-somethings new to the organized left. Starting in 2016, hundreds of veterans of left-wing groups that had nothing in common with democratic socialism joined DSA, with the intention of turning this now sizeable but somewhat inchoate group into something very much at odds with its founding vision. These included Trotskyists, Maoists, and others who traced their political inspiration and organizational lineage to the Leninist vision of (and here forgive the parade of venerable and stale clichés) creating a “party of a new type” of “professional revolutionaries” who would devote “the whole of their lives” to the cause. This is a vision of revolutionary change whose highest virtues are discipline and hierarchy, neither of which were much in evidence or much valued in DSA before this.
This reverence for authority and structure, for all its ideological variations, at its core differs very little from the model promoted by Joseph Stalin in an ideological primer that he composed in 1924 entitled The Foundations of Leninism, in which he asserted that “the working class without a revolutionary party is an army without a General Staff.” An essentially militarist mentality unites Trotskyist, Maoist, and other Leninist cults operating in the United States, which can be seen in their fondness for terms like “cadre” to describe their hard-core supporters. Accordingly, post-2016, various would-be General Staffs set to work to recruit that wave of younger members pouring into DSA, and in doing so convert the organization into the vanguard party of the American proletariat that they had never succeeded in creating when they were operating under their own banners of deepest red. DSA’s dwindling core of aging veterans who adhered to the traditional left-wing of the possible vision, and who did not think of or conduct themselves as a “cadre,” were not up for the ensuing challenge for control. Once again, as in so many factional wars on the left in the past, power became the real prize. In August 2023, at the organization’s bi-annual national convention, a coalition of self-described communist factions effectively gained control of DSA’s ruling sixteen-member National Political Committee (NPC).
Here I will allow the new leaders of DSA’s NPC to introduce themselves. One of the dominant factions, the Red Star Caucus (with three members elected to the NPC, including one who was appointed co-chair of the national DSA), ran an article in its August 2024 on-line newsletter entitled “Communists Belong in DSA,” announcing that as “a Marxist-Leninist DSA caucus” it was calling “on all communists in the United States to join us” in the struggle to capture DSA and “move toward a revolutionary horizon.” Allied (as well as competing) with the Red Star Caucus is the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), which describes itself as “particularly inspired . . . by those that kept [the movement’s] revolutionary spirit alive in the face of political capitulation: Lenin and the Bolsheviks.” MUG’s vision of the transition to socialism in America is one in which “our class” (that is the working class, in whose name it presumes to speak — another trope of radical history) will take advantage of a future crisis of capitalism
to topple the old order and convene a revolutionary Popular Assembly . . . Under the democratic leadership of a victorious socialist party [led by the Marxist Unity Group or its political heirs], the Popular Assembly will proceed to construct the socialist order. It will dismantle the slaveholder constitution and write the founding documents of the new republic. . . . All parties that accept the laws of the new revolutionary order will be free to operate.
Tough luck for those Americans who will not be not on board with discarding the old (and certainly flawed!) U.S. Constitution for that imposed by “the new revolutionary order.” Embracing this vision of an extra-constitutional and almost certainly violent road to power at home, the communist majority on the NPC scrupulously avoids any criticism of anti-democratic actors abroad, at least those that are anti-American. As the Red Star caucus explained in its “points of unity”: “We see no benefit in levying public criticism of states or movements that are opposed to US empire, as such critique in effect serves no purpose except to create consent for empire.”
Thus no criticism can be heard in DSA’s ruling circle of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela — or Hamas. (It was DSA’s response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel, uncritically celebrating it as an act of legitimate “resistance” to Zionist “settler colonialism,” that led to my own resignation from DSA two days later; I believe in Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, but condemn the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel’s subsequent military response has unleashed on Gaza).
Daniel Bell had experienced the likes of the Marxist Unity Group and the Red Star Caucus many decades before these latecomers to the perennial authoritarian strain of ultra-leftism came into existence. In Marxian Socialism in America, he described the equivalent kindergarten Leninist fantasies entertained by left-sectarian groups of his own era as consisting of “the illusions of settling the fate of history, the mimetic combat on the plains of destiny, and the vicarious sense of power in demolishing [other left-wing] opponents.” Since Bell’s day, however, the advent of social media has fostered and simplified the process through which the sectarian left can with a few keystrokes go about settling the fate of history on the plains of destiny. Consider the explanation for Kamala Harris’ decision to choose Tim Walz rather than Josh Shapiro as the vice-presidential candidate offered by DSA’s NPC in a statement posted to X on August 6, 2024:
Harris choosing Walz as a running mate has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored. Through collective action, DSA and the US left more broadly have made it clear that change is needed. The Uncommitted movement, in which DSA members played crucial roles nationally and in multiple states, pressured the Democratic establishment into choosing a new candidate and backing down from a potential VP [Shapiro] with direct ties to the IDF and who would have ferociously supported the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Most political activists engaged in real-world Democratic Party politics would find the claim that DSA somehow determined Harris’ choice of running mate an absurd example of childish boasting. Fox News, however, which has different priorities, really liked that tweet, amplifying DSA’s claims to exercising such powerful influence over Democratic campaign strategy on “Fox and Friends,” with a chyron on the screen reading “Tim Walz: A Radical, Far Left Ideologue,” and adding on its website, “Walz is not a member of the DSA, but has made favorable comments regarding socialism.”
As for the left sectarians’ vicarious sense of power in demolishing opponents within their own camp, consider how the Marxist Unity Group, in a posting to “X” on July 21, 2024, described the two individuals who more than anyone else were responsible for DSA’s growth between 2016 and 2020:
AOC and Bernie Sanders have abandoned the working class to exploitation and the Palestinian people to genocide. Rather than lead the working class in the battle for democracy, they tried to tail Biden to win bandages for a disintegrating capitalism.
Once again, in the time-honored radical tradition, the sectarian impulse is to eat their own.
While the Republic may well be facing its moment of maximum danger since the election of 1860 and its aftermath (see the events of January 6, 2021 and November 5, 2024), the danger does not come from this quarter. DSA’s new amateurish proprietors have already managed to reduce the organization’s membership from its peak of ninety thousand to seventy thousand. Or perhaps lower: it has been some time since they have offered any authoritative figures.
That is the bad news, I mean for them. The good news, such as it is, is that the views of the NPC sectarian majority likely do not represent that of the actual majority of rank-and- file DSAers. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, safe to say, are not seen as traitors to the cause by most democratic socialists. The communist caucuses that gained control of the NPC probably count no more than a few thousand members, if that, between them. Most of the remaining dues-paying DSAers are not active participants in any of the rival caucuses or in their local chapters.
There still remain sane caucuses in DSA who plan on challenging the control of the ultras at the national convention
in 2025, and I wish them well, but without much expectation that they will succeed. One thing left sectarians are good at is stacking meetings and manipulating votes. And even if the silent majority of DSAers, let’s call them the “democratic socialist caucus,” do regain power, the damage has been done. Thanks to the Red Star Caucus, and others who have succumbed to the Leninist temptation, DSA has become toxic in the eyes of many on the democratic left, for its juvenile ideological posturing and for lending ammunition to the Murdoch media empire. That legacy of would-be Bolsheviks romping across plains of destiny will prove hard to erase.
David A. Bell, a historian at Princeton University and a contributor to these pages, and the son of Daniel Bell, penned a fine article for Dissent magazine a few years ago marking the centennial of his father’s birth. He noted that, despite his own repeated urgings, he could never persuade his father, who certainly did not suffer writer’s block, to write his memoirs. And he ends with a telling anecdote about his father’s relationship with my generation of young radicals in the late 1960s. His father, he tells us, “worried about the student movement, feared its wildness, looked askance at the hedonism associated with it, but still could not help sympathizing with its political radicalism.” The senior Bell was then teaching at Columbia University and was one of a number of faculty who tried to negotiate an agreement between the students occupying buildings during the Columbia strike of April 1968 and the administration. “But on the night of April 29,” the junior Bell recalled:
negotiations broke down, and the police moved in with nightsticks and tear gas. Many of the students were badly beaten, and hundreds were arrested. I remember waking up early on the morning of the 30th — I was six years old at the time — and finding my father, fully dressed, on the couch. He had been up all night and he was weeping uncontrollably.
For whom did Bell weep during that long and long-ago night? The students, beaten and arrested? Possibly. Columbia’s damaged reputation and future as a learning community? Also possible. His son suggests an additional possibility — that he wept out of frustration and confusion about how to understand the terrible and stark choices that he, his colleagues, and his students were forced to confront in the tragic spring of 1968: “He could never quite reconcile the Jewish conservative and the Yiddish radical within him — never quite decide from what perspective to judge and interpret the times he had lived through.” The tension between the two perspectives, one formed in his youth, the other in adulthood, had a positive side, the son wrote, for it kept the father politically “sensitive to the dangers of extremism, but also to the dangers of injustice.”
I did not know Daniel Bell personally, and I cannot say whether that is the case or not. But if it were true, it would make me think back on him with considerable sympathy. Remaining alert both to “the dangers of extremism,” and to “the dangers of injustice” is a tough balance to maintain. After a lifetime of engagement, sometimes hopeful, sometimes despairing, with the American left I can but aspire, imperfectly, to achieve the same. Can a disabused idealist still be an idealist? How zealously should one oppose zealotry? From one old radical to another, rest in peace, Daniel Bell.
