PRESENT AT THE CREATION

[Valin]

Claremont Review Of Books

Spring 2022

 

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CRB: But even Tom Hayden, in 1962 in the Port Huron Statement, quoted Abraham Lincoln favorably and mentioned the Declaration of Independence. Hayden was still close in a way to the Civil Rights Movement of that time in arguing that America had to fulfill its own promises. Isn’t the situation much worse now?

NP: Well, I’ve explained to people, or tried, over the years in every way I could that the enemy of the New Left was not the Right. The Right didn’t exist for the New Left. It wasn’t on the radar. It was so self-evidently bad. They didn’t have to waste any energy on it. No, the enemy was the liberal community. And a lot of people had trouble understanding this because by the time they got around to hearing it, the word “liberal” had been co-opted or kidnapped, if you like, by the Left. When the Port Huron Statement came out, the original spirit of the young New Left was still there—which was America is bad, but it’s only bad because it’s not living up to its ideals. And our job is to make it live up to those ideals. And we had a great chance because of the circumstances. Stalin was dead. The Soviet Union was making peaceful noises, and we had a window of opportunity that we should take. And we knew what had to be done. We could, first of all, ban nuclear weapons. That was the main issue, and nuclear testing was the proxy for it. And we could get all that done if we got ourselves together and worked together. But at some point that analysis and that agenda changed dramatically—let’s say, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael. Or from David Riesman to Saul Alinsky. Maybe it was 1972, with the bombing of Hanoi, or perhaps earlier when the whole movement turned and said this country was not bad just because it wasn’t fulfilling its own ideals. In fact, it didn’t have such ideals. Those ideals were fake.

They didn’t go as far as the 1619 Project today, which condemns the country for having anti-black racism in its very DNA, but they came pretty close. I mean, they said America not only had become rotten in itself and could only be saved by a revolution, but America was the cause of all the troubles in the world. I mean, for my sins, I published one of the strongest arguments for the latter view by Robert Heilbroner called “Counterrevolutionary America.” He was a very good writer, and he knew how to make an argument. From my point of view now he was terrible, though I was even a little worried about him then, thinking he had gone too far by claiming that the Cold War was our fault. I never really believed that. In any event, I published a lot of stuff like that also on the issue of civil rights or “the Negro problem,” as we called it then. For example, I resurrected Paul Goodman, who, as he told me then, had 19 unpublished books. And I published one of them in full, Growing Up Absurd, which became the bible of the youth movement of the ’60s. And that was what I mean when I say I was present at the creation. Commentary magazine was, if not the prime intellectual source, certainly one of them, where you went to find the intellectually sophisticated case for this movement.

Now, we’ll get to my love affair with America. It was the original New Leftists like me who believed that this country had not lived up to its ideals, but that its ideals were great. I never, never, never hated America. I was a child of immigrants, and it’s not unusual for people like me to feel that way, I mean, to thank my lucky stars that my parents had had the guts to get the hell out of Europe and come here. As somebody told me, you have a shrewd birth certificate. To have been born here was the greatest blessing I could possibly have inherited.

CRB: How is today’s woke revolution worse, or different?

NP: Well, it metastasized. I used to say that it took the long march through the institutions. That was a Maoist slogan. And I never dreamed that the march would wind up so quickly where it wound up. I mean, when Barack Obama was president and Bill de Blasio mayor of New York, I said would you ever have imagined that we’d have a Communist in the White House and a Sandinista in Gracie Mansion? Now, I didn’t think Obama was a Communist, but I certainly thought he was a true leftist and a disciple of Saul Alinsky, whom I knew slightly. I knew those people. I knew what they said when they weren’t being recorded. They were still, to begin with, careful enough not to go as far as today. They would not admit in public to hating the country. When you were having dinner together, however, they said terrible things, like Vietnam was Auschwitz, Harlem was Auschwitz. And I once had a loud fight in one of my then-favorite restaurants, the Palm, with Jason Epstein, who was a founder of the New York Review of Books and my closest friend in those days. And he was carrying on, and I actually screamed at him, I said, “If I felt that way, I would leave this country. What are you doing here?” I meant it, too.

But the hatred of the country was intense, sincere, self-righteous, and slowly infecting more and more people. My transition rightward in response was not Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It was a gradual process. And it took four or five years, little by little; it was difficult because a personal price was involved, as well as my own peace of mind. But when I finally achieved peace of mind, when I finally decided what it was I really believed and what I didn’t believe, I went public, as it were. And from the very first minute, it was war.

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