What a Difference 80 Years Can Make

 It has been some time since I've compared front pages of the New York Times from eighty years apart.  The eighty year cycle is key to the whole Strauss-Howe framework for history, as you know--but because we haven't gone through and successfully resolved a great crisis in 2026, as we had in 1946, this comparison illuminates the enormous differences between that time and ours.  Yesterday's front page, which I will get to in due course, seemed such an acute portrayal of where we now that I was moved to do the comparison again.  The first thing to note, as in other comparisons, is how much more news the 1946 front page contained.  It includes fifteen different news stories and a world news summary in eight columns; yesterday's six-column page has six stories, and teases for twelve more at the bottom of the page.

Two three-column headlines dominate the October 5 page.  On the left, inflation, fueled above all by skyrocketing meat prices and shortages, is the story. Mayor O'Dwyer of New York has asked President Truman to ask the FBI to investigate the "meat famine" in the city and allow imports from Argentina.  A second story under the headline reports that the Office of Price Administration, a holdover from wartime that was about to go out of business, was allowing restaurants to raise their prices on meat dishes by fifteen percent.  A third story reports that a different agency, the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, had been unable to agree on an alternative to the current wage-price stabilization plan, which was failing.  Then as now, inflation was perhaps the most serious domestic issue the country faced, and it was much more serious then.  The explosion of consumer demand and shortages raised prices by 18 percent by the end of 1946, compared to an estimated 3.7 percent this year.  That was the biggest reason for the Republican landslide in the congressional elections that were just a week away, and which, interestingly enough, did not make their way onto the October 6 front page.  A similar story is playing out this year on a lesser scale. 

The three-column headline on the right also has contemporary resonance: "Truman Again Prods Britain on 100,000 Palestine Visas; Backs Jewish State Plan."  Truman said that the proposals of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for "a viable Jewish state in control if its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine instead of in the whole of Palestine."  Eighty years later, as I have pointed out, the Israeli government seems to be executing a plan to extend the borders of that state to what was then the whole of Palestine.  A second story reports that the Attlee government in Britain had immediately rejected the proposal, which had generated intense Arab opposition.  Four other foreign stories, only one from wire services, occupied the rest of the three columns on the right.  An international Italian Economic Commission announced that Italy would have to pay $225 million in war reparations to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Ethiopia--a figure that the great power Council of Foreign Ministers, including those of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, would have to approve.  Another London story reported the creation of a new Ministry of Defense to coordinate Britain's three services.  In China, an unidentified force of Chinese had attacked a US Marine supply depot, and in Yugoslavia the Tito government had arrested an American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation official as a spy.

Between the two big headlines, a Honolulu story reported the first leg of a non-stop B-29 flight from there over the North Pole to Egypt, which had already reached Alaska.  Below that, the Times reported on a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Buffalo, New York. Fresh from his service as a Nuremberg prosecutor, Jackson warned that "there could be no permanent peace unless minorities everywhere were to have at least a minimum of civil rights."  In a related story from Tennessee, an all-white jury had acquitted twenty-three of twenty-five Negroes[sic] "accused of participating in the disorders at Columbia, Tenn., last February 25, in which two Negroes were killed and four white policemen were wounded."  And in local news, a strike meeting of sailors from the merchant marine had ended in violence blamed on Communist members, and five armed men had robbed more than $1,000 from an office of Colonial Airlines.

Yesterday a foreign story of a different kind occupied the top right-hand side of the Times front page. It told how presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have spent a good deal of their time in the Kremlin talking to Vladimir Putin about a big US-Russian energy deal involving a major donor to President Trump.  These talks have gone parallel to their efforts to stop the Russia-Ukraine war, which have gone nowhere.  Such a deal, sources say, would be a big step towards the easing of sanctions against Russia and a warming of Russian-American relations.  Two domestic stories take up the rest of the top of the page.  The first, on the left, deals with by far the biggest Times story of the last week, the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student against seven young men for allegedly sexually assaulting her two years ago, and the way in which the case was originally handled by Cornell and local authorities.  The second, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, tells in detail of US teenagers there who are making money reselling guns to representatives of the Mexican drug cartel.  Below those two is a lighter-than-air story about the city of Philadelphia's first parallel parking championship and the contestants who have already developed an online following by posting pictures of the tight spaces they have maneuvered into.  The fifth story is about an AI algorithm which claims to measure a patient's risk of getting breast cancer from a single mammogram.  And the last deals with our forthcoming election from a framework that was not an issue in 1946: "Justices Brace for Disputes from Election," the headline reads, focusing on the Supreme Court.

In the wake of the Second World War, US readers remained keenly interested in global events, whether or not the US was directly involved in them.  They also followed the doings the federal, state and local government closely, and civil rights had already emerged as an important new issue, even before President Truman took it  up in a big way about 18 months later. They counted on the government to do something about economic distress.  Yesterday the two national affairs stories focused on corruption in high places, and the near-certainty of serious disputes over the outcome of our forthcoming elections.  The  Cornell story reflects decades of evolving social mores, and the AI story points to another big change in how we live.  The domestic and international political orders that the US had been trying to create for the first five decades of the twentieth century are gone, and we have not replaced them.  In the last twenty 25 years we have had three very serious crises to cope with: 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, and the COVID epidemic.  The government's failure to handle any of them in an inspiring fashion and the election and re-election of Donald Trump has destroyed faith in our institutions.  I don't when or how it might be restored.

Is higher ed a fraud?

        Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda.  He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place.  Spoilers ahead! The main characters are:

        Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell.  Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one of the most elite schools in the Northeast. which her late mother also attended.  Jack is teaching extra sections to pay Katrina's tuition.  Katrina has a roommate from Sri Lanka called Cham, a young woman with quite a back story of her own.

         Young Allard Hamburger, a statistics grad student, is the senior Teaching Assistant in Jack's course.  His mother Patricia Hamburger conceived him out of wedlock with a professor named Martin, an astronomer, who refused to drive her to the abortion clinic where she planned to end the pregnancy. Instead she had Allard, gave up her doctoral studies, and eventually went to work at "student research services" at Haven, which is located deep in a forest.  After years of helping students, Patricia is about to be replaced by a chatbot.  Allard knows that his father, whom he has never met, is a professor at a leading university, and he is building a multi-million dollar nest egg by charging foreign students--and only foreign students--for altering their grade to a minimally acceptable 76. 

        Near the beginning of the book, Allard gets a visit from another Sri Lankan, Adi Bhopal, who paid him for a 76 several years earlier.  He now wants to go to grad school and needs a better grade, and asks Allard to sign on to a complicated scheme to give him one.  Allard refuses.  Bhopal has a side hustle of his own: tutoring would-be foreign students at American colleges from Sri Lanka and elsewhere who dream of getting into a western university and transforming their lives.  One of his tutees is a young Sri Lankan girl named Devi from a poor family there.  She knows him as Johannes.  Bhopal/Johannes commits suicide after Allard refuses to help him.  Devi perseveres on her own, but without success.

        Both Jack and his daughter fall afoul of the PC police.  In the opening meeting of his course, Jack uses an incident involving a bird of prey and a squirrel to make a point about different disciplines, and makes a veiled reference to the work of J. K. Rowling, who, in case you didn't know, is persona non grata among the woke because of her transphobia.  That leads to a threatening visit from a Dean, but he survives.  Katrina and her roommate Chan take part in a Christmas Gaudy, a play, which activist students try to turn into a pro-Palestinian demonstration.  When they try to continue the play as planned, they are invited to leave their dormitories.  The real theme of the book, however, is fraud.  Jack Bayern is the kind of old-school academic who cares about doing things right--the reason his career has never gone anywhere--and he is unlucky enough to uncover two cases of it.

         First, the suicide of Adi Bhopal leads Jack to examine the grading history in the introductory statistics course, and he discovers the extraordinary number of foreign students who received a 76 from Allard Hamburger--something which, he knows as a good statistician, cannot be a coincidence. The administration refuses to look into the matter any further or take any action.  Then, by a series of coincidences worthy of David Lodge, Jack and Professor Martin, the distinguished astronomer, find themselves working at, or with, a newly renovated university in Sri Lanka, which is being transformed by lavish funding from China.  Martin claims that his team has found a way to predict where black holes will occur, and Jack and a couple of enthusiastic grad students get the task of checking his statistical methods.  Jack finds that Martin must have been falsifying his data, that there is no other way that he could have gotten the results that he did. Once again he wants to blow the whistle, but he eventually loses his nerve, partly because he needs his new salary to keep his daughter at Haven.

I could not dismiss this last climax as over the top, because of another book I had read recently and reviewed here: How to Rule the World, by recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker.  Working for the Stanford newspaper, Baker uncovered an equally serious fraud that had helped make the career of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whom he eventually forced to resign (with a handsome severance package) from Stanford when he revealed it.  That fraud related to false data claiming to point towards a newly identified cause of Alzheimer's disease, which, if accurate, would have been worth perhaps billions of dollars.  There are professors, as the history of academia shows, who become almost too big to fail. 

The vast expansion of US higher education in the 1960s, I believe, outran the supply of really outstanding intellects.  A critical mass of mediocrity turns dedicated and original academics into outsiders, and makes way for careerists who learn by the time they are 40 that they really don't enjoy academic work that much.  Many of them become administrators, the class that now runs every major university along strict business and public relations principles.  The Ivy League and its competitors depend now on a steady stream of money from Wall Street and the tech sector, and their main function within our society is to provide the young talent that keeps those sectors going.  To attract the maximum number of students and convince their parents to pay enormous annual sums, they must keep them happy during their college years, which is why A- has become the default bad grade at most of them, and assignments have been cut back so much.  Since everyone gets the same grades, they have become irrelevant, and bright young students spend more time networking.  We need another realistic novel focusing on the top administrators and trustees of an elite school.  It could also make a great movie.

23 years of posts--a summary

 One of my sons got AI to read every post in this blog and summarize it.  I think every regular reader will enjoy the results--I certainly did. There is only one reference that I do not understand--I will have to look it up.  Here it is:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6ZgIXvBTMPUswNTjJn9q1jKlKhTz-hd/view?usp=sharing

How much is Trump responsible for?

 I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums.  When I was living in Cambridge and its environs in the 1970s this area was a lot like it, but it isn't anymore.  The break allowed me to think more clearly about the state of our own nation, and to perhaps get a better look at the great, ever-changing forest of American history, zooming backwards from that one orange-colored tree that so dominates our lives.  Yes, our country is in a terrible mess, and yes, we have a president who is truly, in his own way, beyond compare.  But how much of it is exactly his fault, and how many of our current misfortunes can we trace directly to him? It's an interesting question.

Trump cannot reasonably be blamed for the transformation of our economy over the last fifty years or so.  He was not even a key figure in making it happen, nor does he seem to me have benefited much from it before he entered politics.  The New Deal era began to die in the 1970s.  The Republican Party had never really favored it, although Eisenhower and Nixon had lived with and even expanded upon some of its achievements, but by 1976 Ronald Reagan, who believed that government was the solution not the problem, was very nearly the dominant figure in the Republican Party, and he definitely took it over four years later.  Something parallel had happened among the Democrats, where the new generation of 1974 had run against big government and special interests and had begun to replace the economic issues of previous decades with social ones.  Reagan introduced long-term peacetime fiscal irresponsibility into American government in order to make the rich richer, and the deregulation of financial markets began.  While Gordon Gecko was about as old as Donald Trump, he looms in retrospect as far more of a harbinger of things to come, since he worked in finance, not real estate.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton each took major steps to cut Reagan's deficits, and by 2000 Clinton had created a significant federal surplus, but George W. Bush immediately returned to Reagan's permanent deficits, while allowing financialization to run wild and create the housing bubble.  Barack Obama in 2009 might have revived some of the principles of the New Deal in response to the 2008 crash, but he chose not to, convinced that there was nothing fundamentally unsound about our new system.  He did cut Bush's deficits substantially--as every Democratic President since JFK had done--but he was the last Democratic president to do so.  Trump cut taxes again and the deficit ballooned again, exploding to unprecedented heights during the COVID response, and Biden did not reverse the damage.  The deficit in Biden's last fiscal year, 2024, $1.83 trillion, was nearly twice as high as the deficit in Trump's last pre-pandemic year, 2019, when it was just $984 billion.  Meanwhile the share of the richest 1 percent and ten percent of our nation has grown steadily, while the lower half of the population has been stuck at the same level.

Trump has claimed to repudiate the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, but even this is only a half truth.  The end of the Cold War under Reagan ushered in a new idea of American indispensability and supremacy, celebrated publicly by both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.  More specifically, 9/11 unleashed an unprecedented era of American imperialism, marked by attempts to replace hostile Middle Eastern regimes with cooperative, friendly clients.  Begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, these attempts were continued by Obama in Libya and in Syria--but none of these initiatives left the target nation better off or turned it into a reliable friend of the US.  And now, two years into his second term, Trump has embarked upon what is turning into the biggest catastrophe yet, the attempt to complete the neoconservative agenda by removing or crippling the Islamic regime in Iran.  That was already orthodoxy among the Republican leadership thanks in large part to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Mitch McConnell had done everything it could to try to stop Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and essentially recognized Benjamin Netanyahu, not President Obama, as his the spokesman for his preferred middle eastern policy.  And it was Biden, not Trump, who allowed Israel completely to destroy the Gaza strip and leave its population homeless after October 7.

Writing in 1997, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe had argued in their book The Fourth Turning that during the next twenty years, a great crisis would allow a new president to mobilize the nation, solve critical problems, and build a new political consensus as FDR and Lincoln had done.  Their list of possible crises included (but was not limited to) a terrorist attack, an economic crisis, and an epidemic.  All three have now come to pass, and the first two at least did produce a broad surge of renewed patriotism, but Bush II and Obama failed to deal adequately with the first two, and the third one divided the country more than ever.  Trump understood one key point.  Disastrous consensus economic and foreign policies and the failure to respond effectively to these crises had utterly discredited the leadership of the two major parties, leaving an opening for a nationally known demagogue like himself.  A large plurality of Republicans and a near-plurality of the country voted for him in 2016 not in spite of his opposition to consensus positions but because of them.   

Trump in his second term, however, has made two kinds of changes that no one else would have made.  To begin with, in foreign policy, he has treated the nation's oldest friends as enemies and even expressed designs upon the territory of Denmark and Canada.  In Ukraine he has abandoned the role of the defender of nations against aggression that the US played for most of the twentieth century.  And while the war against Iran was already part of the neoconservative playbook, he has waged it with unprecedented fecklessness, taking no account of what was going to happen, blindly following the advice of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the views of much of his own team, and doing unprecedented harm to the world economy.  He has also crippled our foreign policy establishment, eliminating USAID and ignoring the State Department, while private citizens, including his own son-in-law, take over the most important diplomatic assignments without any oversight, and all the while using this role to build up their own economic power.  We have never seen anything remotely like this before.

And at home, Trump has purposefully, consciously degraded our entire political process in an equally unprecedented fashion.  I am not merely referring to his election denialism, but to the whole tenor of politics as he practices them.  He constantly uses contemptuous language towards the whole opposition party, towards media critics, and towards anyone who gets in his way.  This is exactly the kind of language that Washington and Jefferson, who occupied the White House at the beginning and the end of an equally contentious era, warned us against.  No president--including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--ever used language like his towards opponents before.  Trump also has no understanding of or respect for our Constitution and how our institutions are supposed to work.  The whole idea of bureaucracies applying rules impartially is anathema to him--perhaps because he is such a chronic rule-breaker himself--and he has filled the most sensitive positions with flunkies who understand that their job is to reward his friends and punish his enemies.  He has found numerous ways to use the presidency to make money for himself.  And now he has offered every adult American $5,000 for their votes in the upcoming election.  

Strauss and Howe showed that from 1774 to about 1794, from 1861 through 1865, and from 1933 through 1945, the United States established and then re-established confidence in our institutions and in ourselves by mobilizing effectively to deal with great national problems.  They expected their (and my) generation to produce a new Lincoln or FDR who would do the same.  According to the 80-year rhythm that they identified, that process should have been completed by now.  I expect Trump to leave office in January 2029 if not sooner.  He might be replaced by someone equally disruptive.  The two parties don't seem likely to select very impressive candidates in 2028 either, and I expect at least one tech mogul to try for the White House then.  But no matter who wins, I can't at this moment imagine how they might create some new national consensus comparable to the ones that emerged from our previous great crises.  Entropy and fragmentation may have gone too far.

What makes a radical?

 It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week.  [I will continue to use Weathermen as a gender-inclusive term--not least because they themselves did.] It took me just two days to read through it.  Zayd, now hearing 50, is an academic himself (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with his mother.)  He has written a very well-researched book about his notorious parents, drawing on long talks with them and their co-revolutionaries and family members, as well as on very copious FBI files.  Despite some minor splits which only someone my age would be likely to catch--James Chaney, who was murdered along with Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 in Mississippi, was a local Mississippi man, not another student from the North, and the Book of the Month Club in the 1950s did not distribute paperbacks--he does a good job of recreating his young parents' student world.  He is also very frank about their underground activities, tentatively identifying his mother as one of two bombers of the Capitol Building in 1970 (she would neither confirm nor deny) and detailing their peripheral involvement in other famous crimes, such as the prison break that sprung Timothy Leary in California.  They were not charged for any of these crimes after turning themselves in in late 1980, because the FBI had had to close the cases after its own wrongdoing during investigations had come to light.   His mother did have to spend some months in prison not long afterwards because she had helped create fake IDs that were used in a bank robbery in New York in 1981 in which several people were killed, but the court ordered her release after she refused to talk.  Subsequently both of them re-established careers as a lawyer (Dohrn) and teacher (Ayers), remaining politically active in Chicago, and eventually becoming acquainted with Barack Obama. 

As I have mentioned many times, I saw the emergence of the New Left first hand in the late 1960s as an observer and a critic.  Two of my best college friends became deeply involved with it--although not in any illegal activity.  Both abandoned its views within a few more years.  Steve Kelman, who was one year behind me, captured the atmosphere of that time brilliantly in his early memoir, Push Comes to Shove.  Neither Kelman nor I, for different reasons, ever bought the radical line of the SDS.  He was a proud Norman Thomas socialist.  I was, first of all, a proud liberal Democrat even after I turned against the Vietnam War, and secondly, a student of Orwell, who had handed in his dissertation on the development of Orwell's thought just a couple of weeks before the Harvard SDS occupied University Hall.  The SDS reminded me too much of the totalitarian movements Orwell had polemicized against.  I was also influenced by the social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew.  I took his extraordinary course in race relations in the fall of 1968, and he talked at some length about the damage that the Black Power movement--to say nothing of the Black Panthers--had done to the civil rights movement.

I am not going to narrate the various activities of Ayers and Dohrn in any great detail, fascinating though they were, but I will talk about their early lives and the key turning points in their revolutionary careers, in order to try to get at the question I have been intermittently wondering about for 60 years: why, exactly, did a significant number of my contemporaries decide, within just a few years, that our country and its elite were irretrievably evil, and any and all possible means needed to be used to try to overthrow its government and society?  And why do significant numbers of young people still adopt such views today, even though there is no violent underground now?

Neither Dohrn nor Ayers, unlike a number of other leading student revolutionaries, were Red Diaper babies whose parents had been communists in the 1930s or 1940s.  Dorhn's father was the children of Jewish immigrants who had married two Protestants (the first one died young), changed the family's name from Ohrnstein to Dorn, and struggled with some success to reach the middle class.  He was, by his daughter's account, a racist, and voted Republican.  Bernadine, born in 1942, was the first member of her family to attend college, at Miami University of Ohio.  Bill Ayers, born two years later, was well-off--his father ran a large electric power company in Chicago, and was a typical liberal Republican of that era.  He arrived at the University of Michigan in 1963--where the SDS had been founded one year earlier. He tried to join the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in late 1964 but found that it had come to an end, partly because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He dropped out of college and spent a year in the Merchant Marine. Dohrn's boyfriend had talked her out of going to Mississippi in early 1964, and she had gone to the University of Chicago Law School in the fall of that year. In the summer of 1966 she became involved in Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests in the Chicago area, where King said he had encountered more bitter hatred than he had ever seen in the South.  She joined SDS then. She was beautiful, often provocatively dressed, and charismatic, and she almost immediately became a leading figure in the organization.

Ayers, meanwhile, returned to Michigan in the fall of 1965 as the Vietnam War was heating up, and joined SDS almost at once. After being arrested in a protest, he dropped out again and went to work at the Children's Community School in downtown Detroit. There he met his first love, a young woman from a wealthy family named Diana Oughton, who also became a revolutionary and was eventually blown up with two comrades in a bomb factory in Greenwich village in early 1970.  By the middle of 1967, with the Vietnam War getting bigger and bigger, they both quit the school to become full-time activists.

In the summer of 1969 the SDS held a famous national convention in Chicago dominated by a split between the Maoist Progressive Labor Party on the one hand--whose Harvard members had defied a majority SDS vote NOT to occupy University Hall and gone ahead a few months earlier--and a revolutionary faction led by Dohrn, which, according to Zayd, believed that white revolutionaries had to ally with the Black Panthers.  Dohrn and some of her allies then spent several weeks in Cuba which, she acknowledged much later, convinced her that revolution in the United States was still possible. Ayers and others, including Kathy Boudin, daughter of one of the leading left wing lawyers in the US, were now going through struggle sessions to enforce ideological purity and group sex orgies to break down bourgeois values.  The new group became the Weathermen, and eventually the Weather Underground.  Some also began learning how to handle dynamite, and on October 6, a big explosion in a Chicago park that destroyed a statue of a policeman kicked off the Days of Rage, several days of violent protests in which the Weathermen battled the police, who responded with mass arrests.  Two months later, Fred Hampton, the leader of Chicago's Black Panthers, was murdered in the middle of the night during a Chicago police raid.  The Weathermen, including Dohrn and Ayers, decided to go underground and go to war with the government in alliance with the Black Panthers.    Their bombings began in early January 1970, and their most destructive planned bombing--of a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which might have killed dozens of soldiers and their girlfriends--never came off, because the planners, including Diana Oughton, were killed when their Greenwich Village townhouse exploded.  The bombing campaign peaked in 1970-2, including large late night explosions in both the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and tapered off until 1975.  As Zayd explains, the bombs were generally planted during the day by well-dressed young women posing as secretaries, inspired by Muslim Algerians who passed as Europeans and planted bombs in soda fountains as depicted in the film, The Battle of Algiers.  They did take precautions to try to insure that no one would be hurt, setting the bombs to explode late at night and telephoning in warnings.  That was not all.  In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn took $25,000 from friends of Timothy Leary, the former Harvard Professor turned LSD advocate, to organize his breakout from a California prison.  Smuggled out of the country, he eventually reached Algeria and moved in with fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.  They fell out not long after, and the US government eventually caught up with Leary in Afghanistan.  

Dohrn, Ayers, and eventually their children remained on the run throughout the 1970s.  The government had to drop most of its cases against the Weathermen because of misconduct on its own part, and Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in in 1980.  They were not charged with any further crimes. During the rest of the 1970s, however, underground Weathermen assisted the underground Black Liberation Army in carrying out bank robberies and other crimes.  They often provided white female drivers for getaway cars, whom the police were unlikely to stop.  Dohrn worked for a while an upscale baby clothing store in Manhattan, where she would ask for driver's licenses from customers who wrote checks, memorize and write down the data, and give it to underground figures who would use it to secure copies of the licenses that could be used to rent cars for robberies.  One such car was used in the robbery in Nyack, New York in 1981, in which one security guard and two policemen were killed.  The perpetrators were caught immediately, and served long sentences. Dohrn's connection to the crime was discovered but she was not charged.  The government jailed her for months to try to compel testimony, but she would not talk, and eventually a judge had to release her.

I turn now from this narrative, based on Zayd's far more detailed account, to the question of why.  My answers are speculative, based literally on decades of reading and thinking about these issues. 

Adolescence involves developing one's own world view, and Jean Piaget pointed out that many adolescents easily fall for sweeping explanations of what makes the world work.  In addition, I am now convinced, many of us carry around the effects of trauma that we have literally inherited from our parents, often without even knowing what their source was.  The trauma makes one feel that he or she must have done something terrible to warrant it.  It can also leave one with enormous unresolved anger. All these elements, in my opinion, played into late 1960s activism.

The Vietnam War  was indeed a terrible mistake that inflicted enormous cruelty on the people of Indochina. took the lives of about 58,000 young Americans, and crippled others for life.  My question, however, is why so many young people not only opposed it, but also eagerly concluded that it proved that the whole of American society was irretrievably imperialist, racist, and unjust, and that any means could properly be used to bring it down.  Following the late Alice Miller, a German Jewish psychoanalyst, I am convinced that this world view temporarily relieved its adherents of their own guilt, which they had suffered without any idea of where it came from.  It also allowed them violently to express their anger.  I saw that anger first hand in many Harvard demonstrations, and it was terrifying.  This may also explain why the SDS and the Weathermen both began terrorizing their own members, forcing them in struggle sessions to admit terrible ideological error, as Dohrn herself eventually had to do while underground, confessing to accusations of sexism herself.  Because they had no idea where their guilt and rage come from, they had to keep finding new targets upon which to vent it.  And some of them eventually decide that only by resorting to illegal violence can they prove that they are actually worthy people on the right side of history.

The Black Panthers--who have now been mythologized beyond recognition even in the mainstream media--also exemplified` this, I think, and they played a key role in the splits in the SDS.  They were waging a generational fight against their older generations, who had endured so much and worked so patiently to overcome legal segregation.  The Panthers distinguished themselves by their willingness to resort to violence, especially against the police, and the white radicals accepted their self-image as the only true representatives of the black urban population.  That is why they continued to help them carry out robberies after they had all gone underground.  The white radicals were looking for absolute virtue, and they chose to identify it with the Panthers because the Panthers claimed to be fighting racism.  It is easier for many people--and here I speak from personal experience, too--to feel pain on behalf of other people than on their own.  It is also easier to locate virtue among people that one does not know very well, and one of the enduring left wing legacies of that period is the idea that virtue can be found only among the oppressed.  That is the key to wokeness.  Indeed, in Zayd's book one finds the direct ancestors of nearly every major tenet of contemporary leftism. The ideas of white privilege and intersectionality, which had not yet been named, come up again and again.  There was a period in the late 1960s when any blow against society and its values suddenly became heroic, and Dohrn herself fell victim to this when she expressed some admiration for the daring of the Manson family. 

Despite the Vietnam War, the society that many of my contemporaries rebelled against was healthier in many ways than ours today.  It had made several decades worth of dramatic progress against racism and against economic inequality--the latter of which soon came to a screeching halt.  That however made no difference.  To me, the whole radical revolutionary movement illustrates a disease to which modern society remains vulnerable.  I have not written this  post to suggest how things might have been different or how recurrences might be avoided, but merely to provide a different perspective on why it breaks out, and to suggest that it undeniably grows out of very real aspects of human nature.