Chastened fifty years later . . . but must we disavow?

I was kidding with my friends: “Biden won’t pick me or Karen Bass. We were on the V.P. short list until that stuff about the Venceremos Brigade came up.”

This article says: “The Trump campaign has rushed to smother any nuance, calling Bass ‘Communist Karen’ in a press release that aggregated a series of stories detailing Bass’s past travel to Cuba, including her first time there, in 1973, with the Venceremos Brigade, a creation of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the leading left-wing, anti-war groups of the era.”

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As a college student I had signed up to go to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. I don’t remember if the year was 1971 or ’72 or ’73 (the latter being the year that Karen Bass first went). The trip I was supposed to join was scheduled for the spring. We spent the winter doing fundraisers for it. We charged for admission to see a revolution-themed movie called La Hora de los Hornos. I was totally into it, but my parents freaked out to such an extent that I ultimately backed out, didn’t go on the trip.

Karen Bass did go. The sorry sight is that she now has to apologize for it. After all the apologies she still probably will be rejected as a V.P. candidate on account of her former radicalism.

And that’s what it’s come to for those of us who were New Leftists in the sixties and seventies. We’re supposed to now disavow our “youthful radicalism.” Bernie found himself in that situation.

Obama, too. Many people don’t know how radical he actually was when he was in his twenties. He and I attended some of the same left-wing conferences during the eighties when he was a student at Columbia University in New York. At the time I was a member of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), the sponsor of the Socialist Scholars Conferences. Obama wasn’t a member, but he was close with some of those in the milieu, even as late as the years leading up to his first campaign for office (Chicago, early 1990s). By 2000 he had to . . . disavow.

Let’s talk about what Karen Bass finds she has to say about it in 2020. It was fifty years ago that we thought A Better World was in the offing. We thought: surely, by the turn of the millennium, as our generation assumed leadership roles in the society — culminating our Long March Through the Institutions — capitalism would be overcome, racism would be history, gender equality would be the social norm, all nuclear weapons would be abolished. What had appeared “radical” in 1970 would be the conventional wisdom, if not by 2000, surely by 2020.

Of course, now we recognize that we were naive. What happened to McGovern in 1972 represented the specter of the Leviathan that we were up against. It’s quite a monster, and few in the movement fully appreciated its size and its depth.

My god, from McGovern vs. Nixon to . . . Biden vs. Trump . . . and Karen Bass has to disavow in order to be considered. It would have made us very sad, maybe despondent, if our Venceremos (“we will emerge victorious”) crew had been able to get a glimpse of the 2020 reality.

But there’s no fault here. There’s no shame in being naive. When, during the ensuing decades, we could hardly move the Leviathan more than a foot or two, we just had to back off and examine more thoroughly what it is we’re dealing with. We should readily admit to chastening, and ongoing clarification, but I think that there’s no need for disavowal.