Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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