Five Minutes With
Todd Gitlin
Columbia University journalism and sociology professor Todd Gitlin was one of the most important student activists of the 1960’s. As a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan,he was involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War. Today he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines, including Mother Jones, Columbia Journalism Review, The American Prospect, and Dissent, among many others. He is the author of a dozen books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Letters to a Young Activist as well as two novels and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. His twelfth book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Revival of American Ideals is forthcoming in October. Here, Gitlin speaks to Campus Progress about why Iraq is not Vietnam, how life really was different for young people in the sixties, and why David Horowitz thinks he’s so dangerous.
Campus Progress: You were a student leader when the protests against the Vietnam War were just getting started. Do you see parallels between that time and now, with the war in Iraq?
Todd Gitlin: Well, the times are extraordinarily different. The wars are different, all wars are different. First of all, the Vietnam War was a war that had been inflamed by incumbent Democratic presidents at the time when the Democratic Party was the dominant party. So the fight over the war was, in a sense, a very bitter family fight. Vietnam was not a war devised by the right wing.
Secondly, by the time the war escalated, there was already a backlog of movement growth. There had been the civil rights movement; there was already something that called itself the “New Left.” There was already an organization that cut across issues, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There was, in other words, already a culture of opposition.
The third thing is there was increasingly a general spirit of rebelliousness and alienation. The term that later came into use to describe all this was counterculture. Suffice it to say that there was a sense on the part of a growing number of young people that they were apart from, estranged from, horrified by, revolted by something they felt to be a heavy handed establishment that they wanted to disaffiliate from.
Was this your feeling at the time?
Probably, the major tension within that world of rebellion and opposition was the tension between those who had a fundamentally political point of difference with what we thought of as “the system,” and those who were primarily cultural. And I was primarily a politico. But as the decade moved along, having for a long time harbored intellectual sympathies for the cultural rebelliousness, I came to feel a more fervent and visceral alienation. I had gotten involved in student politics in 1960s. By the time the Vietnam War came around I was very much in the camp of what we called the politicos.
There’s a cultural background also that you have to understand. America was booming. There was a kind of wonderment about being young. We felt like a golden crowd. Much of the civil rights movement had been launched by and pursued by young people. So we were already kind of a cadre with experience.
The economic underpinnings were also important. We had the ability, in many ways, to live off the fat of the land. Living was cheap. When I think about the differences between living then and living now I can summarize them with two words: real estate. You could live really cheap. My second year of graduate school, my then-wife and I lived in a two-room apartment in Ann Arbor and the rent was $112 a month.
So the stakes are higher for students today? There’s more pressure to choose a career and start earning a living early.
Students were not graduating from university in debt. There was a feeling, and it was a justified feeling, that you could get by. And this was liberating! This stuff put people in an experimental state of mind about their lives. You’d say, well, I’ll try this, I’ll try that. You’d feel footloose. You’d feel like taking a year off and just roaming around. Maybe you just wanted to try something different, you wanted to sit in a corner and write short stories or something like that. So you did that. If you were middle class, there was much less of an imperative to take a standard job and indenture yourself to the corporate world.
That atmosphere of permissiveness was not just permission in the culture to smoke marijuana or be a political organizer, but just to take on a different sort of identity. That freedom was important, and led a lot of young people to think, well, let’s see what we can accomplish. So that’s obviously drastically different from the atmosphere of today. A lot of young people today feel choked by the economics.
How did you, in the sixties, deal with the proponents of the war in Vietnam asking you for your alternative to continued war?
The logic of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was relatively simple and was permitted to be simple. Whatever your views of Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front were, it was always reasonably obvious that the alternative to the American presence in Vietnam was a unified Vietnam under the Communist party. It was a known alternative. It was not necessarily a glorious result, but certainly preferable to the continuing horror of the war.
I think that one factor which has retarded the re-emergence of a strong antiwar movement is ambivalence about what would happen if the US troops would leave [Iraq] now, because there is no inheritor of Iraq that has the sort of legitimacy that the Viet Minh and its successor, the government of North Vietnam, did. And so I think this has been maybe unconsciously a retardant.
But how did you deal with the sentiment or political idea that the United States has a mission to democratize the rest of the world? That ideology existed when we were fighting in Vietnam, and now it’s back again.
That sentiment, which Bush was promoting, has already retreated to its hard-core true believers. I mean, it’s very, very hard, given the experience of the last four years, to maintain that what’s being created in Iraq is a democratic model that’s going to sweep through the Middle East.
Don’t you sometimes think that until we counteract the myth of democracy importation through war once and for all, we will keep facing these problems?
Well, that’s what we believed in the sixties. And it did come back again, because the imperial temptation is an easy recourse for a country so big and with such a falsely innocent sense of itself.
And so it’s back, but how do you deal with it? Americans, I think, are not in general enamored of imperial majesty. But they’re also vulnerable to a feeling that they’re entitled to a higher innocence, and that that should result in their sprinkling goodness-dust all over the world wherever they go. Periodically, defeat concentrates the mind. But even after the Vietnam War, which was blatantly a defeat for the United States, there were those who believed that if only the US had fought harder, if only they had not been limited by civilians in Washington, they would have won what was a noble cause, as Reagan said. Bush is clearly one of those people who believes that the United States would have won the Vietnam War if we’d simply stuck it out.
David Horowitz named you one of America’s 101 most dangerous academics. How did you feel about that?
How do I feel about that? Revolted, amused, bored. David Horowitz has been elaborating this fantasy about how the world works for 20 years now. I’m one of his favorite enemies. I suppose in a small way I was proud to still be in his sights.
Why does he find you so provocative?
I’ll tell you why. Because I demonstrate that it’s possible to have learned about the excesses of the left without becoming a right-wing maniac.
Unlike many of his enemies I’m not an unreconstructed revolutionist, I’m not a Marxist-Leninist or a third world apologist, I’m not somebody who thinks that America is the worst civilization in the history of the world. And yet I’m not an America First-er or a happy jingoist. I complicate the world and he’s a cartoon character. He has a stick-figure mind and it’s disturbing to his scheme of things that there are people like me.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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