THE DANGER OF PLAYING AT REVOLUTION

UP against the wall!" The slogan, usually in combination with a few supplementary obscenities, has become the battle cry of the U.S. protest movement--or at least a sizable part of it. The words express a temper of growing violence, brutality and authoritarianism among protesters. Sometimes in the exultation of a demonstration, sometimes in recoil from police clubs, sometimes out of sheer gall, protesters cry out for "revolution" as the only solution to the nation's ills. Those who urge revolution and sanction violence remain a minority, but they are influential beyond their numbers on the campus, to a lesser extent in the ghetto, and in print.

The problem is not protest as such. In some ways, it can be considered encouraging that more and more young Americans refuse to accept any disparity between U.S. ideals and U.S. realities. There is something gallant about a generation that questions a doubtful war, racial injustice, poverty amid plenty and ecological destruction. But the danger is that the reckless invocations of revolution and violence will defeat the very reforms that the most thoughtful of the protesters desire.

To some extent, the tone has been set by the black radicals. Speaking for the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael announced: "We believe in violence. I am using all the money I can raise to buy arms. It is now necessary to attack police stations and kill policemen." Despite such outbursts, there are some signs that other black leaders are developing a greater sense of reality about what can be accomplished through violence of word or deed; certainly the ghetto riots have been cooled. But a sense of reality is distinctly missing in many of the student protesters, for whom hate-filled tirades have become commonplace. At a meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society in Princeton, N.J., a representative from Rutgers expressed the apocalyptic mood: "I'm a nihilist. I'm proud of it, proud of it! I want to--this goddam country. Destroy it! No hope, not in 50 years. Tactics? It's too late. Let's break what we can. Make as many answer as we can. Tear them apart."

Assault on Liberalism

It may be only rhetoric, but such rhetoric can have corrosive and hypnotic powers of its own. At its core is not merely hate but a vision of power. During an antiwar demonstration in Washington, New Left Historian Staughton Lynd had an almost mystical vision of mob rule: "It seemed that the great mass of people would simply flow on through and over the marble building, that had some been shot or arrested, nothing could have stopped that crowd from taking possession of its Government. Perhaps next time we should keep going."

The continuing wave of campus disorders makes it clear that to the new extremists, the enemy is not the conservative or the reactionary but the liberal. John Bunzel, a liberal political scientist at San Francisco State College, has been repeatedly shouted down in class; his two cars have been smeared with paint and their tires slashed; a bomb was placed outside his office. An S.D.S. student told him why: "You are a perfect symbol. You are over 40, you are white, and you have a doctor of philosophy degree. You are visible, in that you speak your mind in public. You are committed to reason. Your arguments are always rational and organized, but most of all you are a liberal. You represent liberal values."

Destruction becomes an end in itself. At Roosevelt University in Chicago, some 150 protesters swarmed into the president's office, smashed newsmen's tape recorders, threatened secretaries. The reason? They wanted five students who had been suspended in a previous disturbance to be reinstated. Damage has been done to people as well as property. In the act of setting a bomb in the Creative Arts Building at San Francisco State College this month, a 19-year-old student was blinded and maimed. A security guard at the same college is still hospitalized from an injury suffered in an earlier bomb blast. Ghetto and campus violence seemed to coalesce at the University of California in Los Angeles when two Black Panthers were shot to death by members of a rival group.

What makes all this especially disturbing is not, in the first instance, that protesters desire revolution. It is, rather, that they are naive about the nature and history of revolution, and what it takes to bring one about. It is obvious that any hope for revolution in the contemporary U.S. is absurd. Yet since some radicals talk and act as if revolution were possible, a few hints from history need to be considered.

For one thing, successful revolutions are typically linked to severe economic dislocations. Despite continuing ugly poverty, particularly among blacks, the American economy is so robust that talk of a revolution based on economic discontent verges on fantasy. Military disaster is another spur for revolution. If sufficiently prolonged, the Viet Nam war might make trouble for the democratic process; more than any other issue, it has already brought moderates to the side of the would-be revolutionaries. Yet no matter how bitter the physical or psychic wounds caused by Viet Nam, the war is still a long way from destroying the normal life or traditional institutions of the U.S.

Mystical Tactics

Revolution takes considerable organization--usually the establishment of almost competing administrative bodies, such as the Committees of Correspondence set up prior to the American Revolution or Lenin's Soviets. But the current revolutionaries disdain organization. Besides, it is difficult to see where their potential allies might come from. S.D.S. Secretary Carl Davidson speaks wistfully of organizing campus maintenance workers. The notion of sturdy, unionized elevator operators or "custodians" making common cause with the campus radicals is an almost touching illustration of the impracticality displayed by some S.D.S. leaders. Many radicals themselves would scorn such an alliance because they shun the blue-collar class as part of the corrupt Establishment.

Apart from workers, another potential group of allies might be the intellectuals. Revolutions are speeded by a mass defection of the intelligentsia from the established government. Long before the storming of the Bastille, most French intellectuals (with a few crusty exceptions like the Marquis de Sade) had become infatuated with the Enlightenment philosophy and were ready to redesign the world. Today, many of the younger instructors on American faculties have led, joined or succumbed to the radicals, but the older, traditionally liberal professors are increasingly alarmed by the New Left's contempt for democratic and academic freedoms.

The Establishment itself must be sharply divided if it is to be overthrown. The ancien regime was so riddled with nobles contemptuous of the monarchy that it quickly crumbled at the hands of its enemies. The U.S. Establishment is not only stable but flexible; it renews itself by welcoming qualified newcomers, despite ethnic or class origin. Most important, no revolution can succeed without the support of a part of the armed forces. Yet not a single element of the U.S. military seems even remotely inclined to side with the New Left revolution.

Why, then, do radicals persist in calling for an impossible revolution? Some, of course, refuse to concede that it is impossible, but many recognize the truth. Why, then, play at revolution? Some believe that their gestures add up to an effective tactic. By constantly denouncing and ridiculing an institution, says Carl Davidson, the rebel "desanctifies" it. "People will not move against institutions of power until the legitimizing authority has been stripped away." Another tactic is to incite repression --to invite police fury--and thereby shock the moderate majority. As Mary McCarthy put it: "If the opposition wants to make itself felt politically, it ought to be acting so as to provoke intolerance."

But such more or less Machiavellian hopes do not fully explain the behavior of people who almost yearn to get their heads cracked. The driving force may be emotional more than political. Says Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: "When they chant 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,' they chant of strong fathers with strong convictions. They suggest a desperate need for control from outside." The generational revolt is not complete. The Yippies' Jerry Rubin complained in the New York Review of Books that "many activists have been forced to turn to their parents for help rather than to the movement which is to overthrow their parents' institutions."

Many of the rebels are acting out of a general sense of despair about America--and this despair deserves a measure of respect. But other aspiring Jacobins seem to regard the shouts and gestures of revolution merely as drugs for instant, mystical satisfaction. Perhaps the most striking feature of the movement is its vagueness. It is determinedly unprogrammatic, unhistorical. Its goals are undefined, and defiantly so. New Left Spokesman Carl Oglesby charts the radical's course in a recent article: "Perhaps he has no choice and he is pure fatality; perhaps there is no fatality and he is pure will. His self-estimate may be sophisticated and in error or primitive and correct. His position may be invincible, absurd, both, or neither. It does not matter. He is on the scene."

Many protesters who invoke revolution are really at one with the romantic anarchists of the 19th century. As such, they can only be regarded as amateurs by professional revolutionaries and historians. Marx, among others, was scathing about those who attempt revolution when conditions are not right for it.

Such harsh logic does not necessarily settle the matter. There can be something admirable and heroic in a revolutionary gesture even if it is totally futile and foredoomed. The revolutionary impulse, though it seems provoked by concrete ills, is often only part of a basic, existential rebellion that man sooner or later carries on against the limits of the human condition. In toiling for a Utopian future, the rebel is often seeking what life itself cannot supply. He welcomes the apocalypse rather than endure imperfection. He conducts what Albert Camus called "a limitless metaphysical crusade." But metaphysics should not be confused with politics.

To condemn the protesters' violent methods is not necessarily to condemn their aims, and certainly not other forms of protest. The U.S. has its share of injustice and rigid institutions that at times do seem beyond reach of normal, peaceful change. Pseudo-revolutionary activity sometimes does bring results. Often it has a shock value that awakens complacent citizens to their responsibilities. The very intensity of radical word and deed communicates a desperate message to less tormented souls. No doubt the uprising at Columbia University finally jolted the administration into an awareness of legitimate student grievances and may well result in a more responsive university. The ghetto riots prodded white businesses into recruiting in the slums.

Imitation of Violence

Yet there is a limit beyond which such shocks fail to be useful and begin to have the opposite effect. Ghetto violence has stimulated fear and resentment in the white majority, whose representatives in Congress have stolidly resisted all calls for the dramatic federal programs that the ghettos so desperately need. The campus rioting may well produce a spate of repressive legislation. Apart from legislation, the riots are also producing an indignation that is in danger of being directed not only at the minority of extremists but at all campus reformers and at the "young" in general.

The fabric of society is not infinitely stretchable. Habits of violence can be established that undermine what men of good will are seeking. One deed of violence tends to trigger another. The ghetto riots produced a climate of backlash in which Martin Luther King lost his life. That assassination, in turn, precipitated another round of riots and black-militant demonstrations on campus. Now each clash between police and students gets worse. People can get used to violence, expect it and sometimes enjoy it.

At the heart of much current revolutionary uproar lies a disconcerting contempt for the individual freedoms that have been established in Western civilization over the centuries. This disdain is expressed most systematically by Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who through an elaboration of the Hegelian dialectic has decided that civil liberties are the opposite of what they seem. That is, they are merely props for the administrative tyranny of present-day democracy, "an instrument for absolving servitude." In this view, civil liberties are mere playthings to gull people into thinking they are free. In Marcuse's Utopia, on the other hand, civil liberties will be severely curtailed for those groups that he feels are destructive.

Once again, as Camus stated, some revolutionaries seem willing to "kill freedom in order to establish the reign of justice." Many liberals take a relatively benign view of this trend because it appears to be on the side of justice. Indeed, liberals have often failed to distinguish genuine social progress from authoritarianism masked as progress. Today, as much as ever, the liberal center has every reason to shun radicals who deny the democratic process and to work with radicals who respect it. Fortunately, the center may be awakening to that need, particularly on some troubled campuses, where a moderate coalition is slowly emerging. Such an alliance may not solve America's problems overnight, but it offers the best hope of stopping extremists from making the problems infinitely worse.

Revolution is a serious business, with a terrible but often heroic tradition, and it must be reserved for situations of extreme despair when no other recourse is possible. Playing at it when it is neither possible nor necessary only makes reform harder to achieve and gives revolution a bad name.

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