Richard Sennett on Fragmented politics, fragmented lives

spiked-politics | Article | Fragmented politics, fragmented lives:

"Yet history has granted the New Left its wish in a perverse form. The insurgents of my youth believed that by dismantling institutions we could produce communities: face-to-face relations of trust and solidarity, relations constantly negotiated and renewed, a communal realm in which people became sensitive to one another's needs. This certainly has not happened. The fragmenting of big institutions has left many people's lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more resembling train stations than villages, family life disoriented by the demands of work; migration is the icon of the global age, moving on rather than settling in. Taking institutions apart has not produced more community."

A very thought-provoking article from Prof. Sennett who teaches sociology at the London School of Economics. Highly recommended, as are companion articles by his fellow panelists at a debate scheduled for Friday evening in NYC. Lots of interesting stuff turns up on spiked-online.com and you can get free email alerts. Check it out.

In the paragraph quoted above, Prof. Sennett is speaking of the disappointment of the signers of the Port Huron Statement in the result of the political changes they helped bring about. Port Huron in 1962 was the scene of a meeting at which the Student League for Industrial Democracy (the youth component of a movement I think Lenin would have dismissed as, in his famous phrase, "left deviationism, an infantile delusion") was transformed into the Students for a Democratic Society (better known by its initials - SDS). Being a bit of cynic, I suspect that many of those involved were not quite so dewey-eyed.

Of course, my perspective may be biased by the fact that I became, about three years later when I was in high school, a subscriber to the Sharon Statement. In 1960, the younger veterans of the abortive effort to make US Sen. Barry M. Goldwater (D-AZ) the GOP nominee for vice-president met at the Sharon, CT, home of the Buckley clan to form Young Americans for Freedom. The relationship between the two youth groups, SDS and YAF, has a curious history.

YAF, the Goldwater campaigns, and the modern conservative movement generally, were all subject to a certain degree of tension between traditionalists and libertarians, often referred to in YAF circles in the 60s and 70s as Trads and Libs. Common ground could often be found in a shared view that the general government should be confined strictly to constitutional subjects. The late Frank Myer, who wrote for National Review in its early days, labored mightily to create and maintain a fusion of the Trad and Lib tendencies because neither was strong enough to prevail alone and, in his view, the goals they had in common were worth fighting for.

These two youth groups, SDS and YAF, had a strange relationship in the turbulent 1960s. There is a tendency to recall FSM (the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the early 60s) as a confrontation between SDS and other leftist students against the school administration in a pattern that persisted for a decade or so through the subsequent campaigns against the Vietnam War. But, in its origin, FSM united SDS and its left allies with YAF, Republicans and others on the right. The original issue at Berkeley was the stultifying political atmosphere of a constant parade of liberal speakers, mostly Democrats of the barely left of center variety mixed with the occasional Republican from the very left fringe of his own party. FSM at first aimed to open up the pursestrings of university-sponsored speakers to include some genuine debate on principles. On this, SDS and YAF at UCB were in agreement.

There were other factors involved of course, but the rise of the Vietnam War as a political issue after President Lyndon Johnson's ill-advised policy converting a purely proxy war of the Cold War period to a struggle directly involving US troops led to a fairly clean break between YAF and SDS. But, that old Trad/Lib business began to divide YAF, with the extreme libertarians moving toward sympathy with some of the rhetoric of the SDS, some due to the war issue, some due to the rising importance of what we have learned to call the "social issues."

In the run-up to the 1969 national convention of YAF these tensions came to a head. The national office worked furiously to halt what some feared might be a takeover of YAF by the New Left. At an emergency chapter meeting of the University of Virginia YAF that summer, I helped to pack our delegation with Trads. At the national convention (which I was not able to attend) a resolution was adopted to prevent cross-membership and one UVa YAFer who also an outspoken proponent of SDS was read out of the organization by name.

YAF was formally non-partisan and not engaged in electoral politics. In some ways it functioned as a lever to move the Young Republicans (and College Republicans and Teen-Age Republicans) to the right. Meanwhile, Nixon's standing with conservatives was falling and Gov. Ronald Reagan's star was rising. YAF had the idea of running a mock presidential nominating convention as a part of its activities at the 1971 national convention. Not only was this considered a lot of fun, but it would give YAFers a chance to practice skills they might want to put to work in the GOP national convention the following year.

It quickly became apparent, however, that the YAF delegates, if left to their own devices, would propose the nomination of Gov. Reagan. Reagan had run a late-starting and unsuccesssful effort to parlay his 1966 election as governor into the 1968 presidential nomination. This effort was doomed when Nixon sent US Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) around to southern delegations assuring them that Nixon would tap Reagan for VP. I don't know if Sen. Thurmond knew this was false, but it is widely believed that Nixon had given a veto over the VP selection to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) in a meeting at the latter's Manhattan home. (It was also at this time that Nixon acquired from Rockefeller the services of Dr. Henry Kissinger.)

Reagan had been a great boon to YAF, helping the organization to raise great sums of money to support its growth. Now, the governor feared that a YAF repudiation of a sitting Republican president in preference for him would damage his chances to win the nomination in 1976. He told the national office that he would sever all connection to YAF and disavow their endorsement of him if the mock convention nominated him.

Faced with that unhelpful prospect, but unwilling to give up on the mock convention idea, the word went out to nominate Vice President Spiro T. "Ted" Agnew, the man whom Rockefeller had foisted on Nixon, as our nominee. Although a liberal Republican in his earlier career, Agnew had been given the assignment by the Nixon White House to feed raw meat to the conservatives to deflect attention from what they were doing to sell out the principles we naively thought Nixon shared with us.

To keep things interesting, the nomination of "favorite son" candidates by the various state delegations was encouraged, and I nominated US Sen. Harry Flood Byrd, Jr. (I-VA) whose predecessor in the Senate (his father) had actually received some electoral votes in 1960. Things went according to plan, Agnew was "nominated," we showed our displeasure with Nixon (not that he cared), and Ronald Reagan continued to support YAF and many of us worked for him in 1976.

In one of those curious twists that politics sometimes takes, a friend of mine from UVa Young Republicans and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists convinced me in about 1973 that the time was right for us to join the nascent Libertarian Party as a way to campaign for limited government. Remember the times, Nixon was under fire over Watergate, Agnew was forced out in October for failing to pay income tax on bribes he received as county executive and governor, Nixon put Jerry Ford in as VP (some said as a poison pill to try to prevent his own impeachment) - a lot of Republicans were getting discouraged.

I became, in short order, a founder of the Virginia Libertarian Party, elected chairman of the party at its first convention, a delegate to the 1974 national LP convention, and then deposed in a coup led by Charlottesville attorney Roger McBride. And, that was the end of my interest in the LP.

They say if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't really there. That may be true of those who were on the left in those days (it's a drug joke), but I suspect it is mostly an unwillingness by most people to contemplate some of the things they did when they were "young and dumb." We who were on the right in those days also have some things we prefer not to remember, but they are not primarily political.