The progressive magazine The Nation published an open letter last month in which former members of the radical 1960s organization Students for a Democratic Society pleaded with a younger generation of leftists to support Joe Biden for president. The letter, titled “To the New New Left from the Old New Left,” warned that the re-election of President Trump would jeopardize “the very existence of American democracy.”
The signatories expressed fear that some supporters of Bernie Sanders, including members of the Democratic Socialists of America, would “refuse to support” Mr. Biden because they consider him “a representative of Wall Street Capital” — and therefore, in essential respects, not fundamentally worse than Mr. Trump.
The letter was fair and sensible in its reasoning and right-minded in its conclusion. Given that the difference of a few thousand votes in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin might allow Mr. Trump to win a second term, a quixotic display of socialist principle in the 2020 election could have disastrous repercussions for the nation and the world.
Unfortunately, the letter’s fears were well-founded. The Democratic Socialists of America had already declined to back Mr. Biden. It has been joined in that refusal by Jacobin magazine, an influential publication among young leftists.
Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin’s editor, announced on Twitter that he would vote for the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins. The magazine has since published several articles on the question of supporting Mr. Biden, including one that criticized the former members of Students for a Democratic Society for “haranguing young socialists,” insisted that building a democratic socialist movement “is the only real hope for the planet’s future,” pointed to the violation of rights under “Republican and Democratic presidencies alike” and downplayed the threat that Mr. Trump poses (“if he had both the will and the capacity to crush his opponents in the style of Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini, he would have done so by now”).
To followers of leftist politics, the argument was all too familiar: The two major parties are merely the right and left wings of the capitalist system. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
It is worth noting that this was also the position of most members of the New Left during the 1968 presidential election. Back then, radical young leftists either refused to vote or supported the candidates of the Peace and Freedom Party, the Freedom and Peace Party, and even the Yippies — the Youth International Party — who encouraged people to vote for a pig named Pigasus. Anyone or anything was preferable to President Richard Nixon except of course the Democratic Party’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey.
This is not the only historical echo in today’s dispute about support for Mr. Biden. In the early 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society, too, found itself in a generational standoff. At that point, the group was the youth branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, which had an older membership and was social democratic, trade unionist and anti-Communist. It didn’t take long for tensions to mount between the two organizations.
In October 1963 members of S.D.S. met with the editors of Dissent magazine, most prominently Irving Howe, to see whether despite their differences the two generations of leftists could make common cause. The meeting did not go well. A major sticking point, then as now, was how to view liberal democracy. The members of S.D.S. argued against representative democracy in favor of what they called participatory democracy. To Mr. Howe their ideas “sounded too much like the fecklessness of our youth, when Stalinists and even a few socialists used to put down ‘mere’ bourgeois democracy.”
Mr. Howe would later express regret about the way the meeting played out, bemoaning his “know-it-all” tone. One of the S.D.S. members of who attended that meeting, Todd Gitlin, wrote about the encounter decades later. He reflected on his and his colleagues’ “rambunctious youth” and confessed that “he had carried for years a memory of this occasion’s sting.”
It is a quirk of history that the young radicals of that time are the pragmatic elders of today. Several members of S.D.S. who attended that fateful meeting in 1963 — including Mr. Gitlin — signed the open letter last month in The Nation. The respectful and diplomatic tone of their letter shows that they learned from the mistakes of Mr. Howe and his colleagues. But tone can accomplish only so much. A younger generation sure of its righteousness is seldom willing to heed the advice of elders.
And “righteousness” is not too strong a word. Maintaining doctrinal purity is a big reason many leftists are refusing to endorse Mr. Biden. Another Jacobin article argued that having the Democratic Socialists of America support “a lesser evil candidate” would have “major ramifications” for … the Democratic Socialists of America.
Are those the ramifications that American socialists should be worrying about? Jacobin and its readers and members of the Democratic Socialists of America are largely white, largely college educated, largely American citizens. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, they could spend the next four years suffering little more than the pangs of political outrage. But millions of less fortunate people would suffer real consequences.
Taking a principled stand is courageous only when those taking it put themselves at risk. Placing others at risk requires no courage at all. As Mr. Howe wrote in a 1965 article on the New Left that applies to many on the left today, there is “an inclination to make of their radicalism not a politics of common action, which would require the inclusion of saints, sinners, and ordinary folk, but, rather, a gesture of moral rectitude.”
The Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin claim to be laying a path to socialism, but it is worth bearing in mind George Orwell’s definition of socialism as “justice and common decency.” In pursuing its vision of the former, the new New Left has forsaken the latter.
Mitchell Abidor is the editor and translator of “Down With the Law: Anarchist Individualist Writings from Early Twentieth Century France.”
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