“[T]he ‘kids’, as the phrase goes, ‘got to me.'” Thus concluded Irving Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope. The book, which appeared in 1982, includes reflections on his conflicts with the New Left during the 60s. All through that decade Howe upheld the banner of democratic socialism, a socialism deeply informed by liberal values, against a radical cohort he then characterized as “intellectually undeveloped, excessively self-righteous, and inclined, at times, to authoritarianism.” Yet looking back on this experience in the 1980s, Irving expressed regret at his approach. He had “overreacted,” “become strident,” and (as he later put it to an interviewer) “went a bit crazy too in my own way.”
Will we experience similar regrets looking back at this moment, a period of similar polemics between liberals and leftists?
Howe’s reflections can serve young liberals as a guide at once subtle and profound. Among them is the insight that mutual respect between liberals and socialists is predicated on a recognition of difference. He prescribed tactical disengagement — that is, allowing different political tendencies to complement one another, both within and across political movements.
Howe learned from bitter experience that feigning ideological uniformity for the purposes of working together would yield disaster. Illusions of unanimity, forced agreement, are far less strategically wise than overt recognition of disagreement. Ideological detentes have their uses. This recognition can be generative.
If liberals can learn to treat one another with the toleration we preach in realms outside our own ideological community, we will be stronger for it. Howe’s philosophy is clear: diversity is a strength.
He was not ever thus.
Howe spent the thirties as a leader of the City College Trotskyists, tearing into “stalinoids” the same way he would tear into the SDS later in Dissent. He believed these polemics were “purgative” — that they purified the Movement of intolerable contradictions and inconsistencies. As such, Howe felt a moral duty to explore and expose the weakness of his fellow comrades’ beliefs — harshly, if necessary — in the hope that it would ultimately strengthen the Left. As he put it in 1966, “In the political tradition from which I derive, it has been common to write with polemical sharpness — hopefully an impersonal sharpness — and then to expect one’s opponent to reply in kind. You argue, you let some heat come through, you don’t pretend that gentility is the ultimate virtue; and then, a little later, it may even be possible to come to agreement, or work together, or accept the fact of difference.”
By the 1960s Howe’s political beliefs had moderated, and he targeted the New Left as a new threat to the liberal socialism he cherished. Nonetheless, Howe kept to his old polemical approach when dealing with these upstarts. When Irving Howe publicly debated SDS leader Tom Hayden on the merits of nonviolence, Howe asked provocatively “Could you love a fascist, Tom?” — leaving Tom enraged and humiliated. As Howe later admitted. “In the middle sixties our style still had elements of the Trotskyist background…it was bristling, it was also very divisive; it worked only in a certain special environment.”
But Howe’s admission reflected a hard-won awareness that his polemics with the New Left, however well-intentioned, were ultimately self-defeating. In that debate, for example, Hayden responded to Howe’s sarcastic query by replying that yes, he could love a Fascist — but he spoke out of anger rather than principle. “I don’t know if I could then love a fascist or now love a fascist,” he later recalled, but “[i[f Irving Howe insisted that I couldn’t then, I would probably say I could. It’s that kind of unhealthy dynamic that I remember the most.”
This “unhealthy dynamic” was, as Howe later recalled, symptomatic of his compulsion to chasten near-enemies rather than assail outright opponents. High hopes for bridging seemingly superficial differences, the pressure to unite against a shared enemy, anger at acts of “vulgarizing” premises that seemed to be shared — all this made conflict within the broad Left far more intense than debates outside it. Indeed, Howe later conceded that his sharpness towards the far left was motivated as much by hope as by anger. He wanted to help young radicals avoid the errors of his sectarian past. Nonetheless, this motivation was inflected with a puritanism residual from his days as a Trotskyist debater. There were correct and incorrect “positions” and they had to be sorted out properly. (“Positions,” he later recalled, were “our vitamins.”) Perhaps identifying these sublimated motivations would have reduced the pressure and intensity of these conflicts — but Howe, “punch drunk” and “dizzy” with conflict, would not reckon with his paternalistic impulses until the curtain had come down.
Howe’s polemics were also turbocharged by the heady sense that all was “urgent,” that “things could be done if they were done right.” It was on these grounds that Howe monomaniacally lambasted the most radical and provocative actions of the far Left. If he could curb the actions of this wayward vanguard, he believed, the rest of the Left would fall into line.
Nonetheless, critics — and later Howe himself — believed that his focus on “the worst excesses of the worst,” distorted Howe’s political compass. On the one hand it gave disproportionate weight to the “wrong-doings” of a few radicals, rather than the broader injustices they were trying to protest. Marshall Berman recalled how Howe seemed “more upset about kids at antiwar demos carrying Vietcong flags than about American bombs ravaging Vietnam.” This orientation also prevented him from identifying possible allies within the radical fringe who could bolster the rest of the movement.
Years later Howe wrote, “Perhaps I should not have gotten so emotionally engaged in disputes with the New Left. But I did. . . I overreacted, becoming at times harsh and strident. I told myself that I was one of the few people who took the New Left seriously enough to keep arguing with it. Cold comfort.”
Aren’t we all always making Howe’s mistake? Our own discursive culture rewards inflammation even more than his did. All of us delight in correcting one anothers incorrect opinions. Perhaps the most radical among us will do what Howe’s generation did. So many of them migrated rightward when things didn’t work out as they’d hoped. What will our permutation of the neoconservative switch look like?
To his credit, Howe never succumbed to the full tide of neoconservatism. He came through the sixties a man of the liberal left. This was in part because he applied the liberal virtues of moderation and balance to himself. Even in the 1950s Howe had recognized that “Few things are more dogmatic today than the anti- dogmatism of the liberal intellectual,” and “few things more closed than his famous open mind.” He lashed out, even then, against the “right-wing social-democrat” who “made a safe politics out of anticommunism,” while losing “that larger sympathy for the oppressed, that responsiveness to new modes of rebellion that a Socialist ought to have.”
In the sixties he proved he meant those things. With hindsight he came to the conclusion that many of his own views were inconsistent with his liberalism. To his great credit, he publicly changed his mind.
And, perhaps more impressively, he changed his attitude. He came to think of his rivals on the left not as “absolute contrasts but rather supplements” which together constitute a formidable movement. this is the philosophy which undergirds his essay, “Liberalism and Socialism: Articles of Reconciliation.” In it Howe noted that two movements learnt essential lessons from one another. The socialist respect for community and the liberal reverence for individual rights both served as a useful model for the other. As Howe put it, “Socialists and liberals have some areas of common interest in balancing these two stresses, the communal and the individual, the shared and the alone. It is a balance that will tilt; men and women must be free to tilt it.” This remains true.
Howe was lucky enough to be spared the spectacle of Donald Trump’s political ascent. But today, liberals are at least as much in need of the wisdom he worked long to accrue. Our tendency to assault the left we (or our algorithms) portray as illiberal, losing perspective and opportunities for complementary action in the process, prevents us from achieving the liberty and equality that any just world must enjoy in equal measure. To seek the purity of ultimate denunciation or reconciliation between liberals and the left, as Howe attempted in the 1960s, is a noble one: but it is a puritanism nonetheless. Far better for us to support one another despite our differences, than to lose our bearings fighting one another for the sake of unity.