Anyone but Bush

Veteran activist Todd Gitlin speaks out about MoveOn, ANSWER, the Greens -- and how progressives need to emulate the self-discipline of the right to win in 2004.

By Laura McClure

Jul 19, 2003 | They weren't supposed to be activists, the college students of 1963. After years of Eisenhower comfort and prosperity, they weren't supposed to have anything to be active about. The class of '63 "was on the trailing edge of what was called the silent generation," writes leading '60s activist Todd Gitlin in his latest book, "Letters to a Young Activist." "The stereotype -- we were timid, gray flannel-suited -- was more right than wrong."

So when the broadly popular Vietnam War broke out in earnest in 1964, the force of the statements made against it by radical student groups came as a shock -- and to many people, suggested a shocking amount of hubris. At the end of 1965, one in three Americans thought students against the war had no right to demonstrate. At Kent State University in Ohio the same year, demonstrators were met by a crowd with rocks, not cheers. And although the anti-Vietnam War movement looms large in the way we imagine the 1960s now, "it wasn't, in that imprecise and evasive cliché, an expression of the times," according to Gitlin. "The times were profoundly polarized."

Gitlin was the third president of the Students for a Democratic Society -- a radical student group that would soon become synonymous with the anti-Vietnam War movement of the mid-'60s. Its influence on other student groups began to spread in 1962 with the publication of the "Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society," which called upon its generation to act for civil rights and mobilize against the bomb. The first sit-ins and teach-ins of the '60s were acts of fertility, says Gitlin, going beyond protest "to create, in the heart of the present, traces of a superior way of life." But as the Vietnam War grew uglier, so too did the tactics used by the student movement. By 1969, looting and arson were acceptable tools of the militant left. The culmination of the '60s -- and end of SDS -- were the Weathermen: bomb-building, shop-smashing militants who interspersed blowing up electrical towers with sex, drugs and talk of revolution. The angry violence tarred the entire antiwar movement. "No wonder we were despised even as the war we opposed was despised," Gitlin writes.

Almost 40 years later, the United States is again fighting a protested war, and again a nation is polarized. But today's activists need not make the same mistakes, says Gitlin, now a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University in New York. In "Letters to a Young Activist," Gitlin offers advice culled from his own experience. "When my crowd was smart (which wasn't always)," he writes, "we were pretty clear about where our indignation belonged and where to channel it ... Our anger was most productive when (1) we had good arguments, (2) we stayed nonviolent, (3) we won a hearing from serious-minded insiders, and (4) we mobilized outside forces."

Much of the book follows in a similarly practical tone. It should; "Letters to a Young Activist" is part of the "Art of Mentoring" series, based on Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." Each book in the series -- which also comprises "Letters to a Young Conservative" and "Letters to a Young Golfer," among others -- consists of letters that offer wise counsel to younger generations. Gitlin's advice focuses on what he calls "practical activism" -- how to channel ideals and outrage into actions that will get results in the world as it exists now. A successful campaign, he writes, must be pragmatic. "It does not simply express itself. It must make arguments and defeat contrary arguments ... You want to change minds, so you don't burn bridges."

For Gitlin, the advisory style is something of a departure from his nine other books, which include "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage." Still, there are a few passages that echo his persona in real life, where he is known -- and sometimes hated -- for razor-sharp opinions rarely voiced by fellow liberals. He's been especially excoriated for his critique of the Green Party, which he blames for the "catastrophe" of the Bush victory in 2000. "Underneath, what Nader voters really wanted was to vent their feelings," he writes. "The purity of their feelings matters so much to them that they are still washing their hands of the consequences ... This is narcissism wearing a cloak of ideals."

In a recent interview with Salon, Gitlin expounded on his views of the Green Party, musing aloud about what a post-Nader left would look like. But his ire was not reserved for "unreconstructed" Greens alone -- any "leftwing fundamentalist" was fair game. "ANSWER is a cult," he said of the Stalinist-led antiwar coalition. "They're impenetrable to people who don't already have the code book." Not even the common, confused Democrat who can't understand why anyone voted for Bush escapes his criticism. "It's a huge failure of imagination if someone can't imagine why someone would support Bush," he said, "since roughly half the population did."

Harsh as some of his comments are, Gitlin's focus on "practical politics" is something of a tough-love approach. "You're right to burn with indignation about the policies streaming out of Washington. I do," he writes. "But the important thing is not what we feel but what we do with what we feel ... The activists of the Right are, above all, practical. They crave results."

And, he suggests, the left has much to learn from them.

Gitlin spoke with Salon by telephone earlier this month from his office at Columbia University.

First of all, is there anything the antiwar movement as a whole could have done to prevent the Iraq war?

I don't think so. I think this is something the Bush administration set out to do right after 9/11, and I don't think any tactical or strategic variations could have interfered with it.

Did you protest?

Yes. I was in several marches. I was in the big New York march, other rallies. I wrote and spoke against the war.

This country became so polarized over the war, so divided along the lines of what David Brooks would call the red and the blue states, that we have become alien to each other. I have friends who absolutely cannot conceive of why anyone in Minnesota would be pro-war, or pro-Bush. How do we bridge that divide?

Well, I've lived most of my life in New York and California, but I did spend four years in the Midwest, and I recommend it to someone who's been strictly coastal.

But it's a huge failure of imagination if someone can't imagine why someone would support Bush. Since roughly half the population did.

OK, but it's a very common failure of the imagination...

[Laughing] I know it is! But everybody on the left should go listen to Republicans and try to figure out what makes them tick. This is across-the-board advice. I would tell people, "Good God, most people are not like you!" I'm reminded of people in 1972 in Manhattan who said, "Jesus, but I didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon." Wake up! Parochialism is never a platform for understanding, and this is another kind of parochialism. One can understand and not understand.

This also requires understanding people who don't make sense: to understand, for example, how 50 percent of the population could be convinced that there was Iraqi involvement in 9/11. That's rationalist heresy.

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