Tom Hayden: A Man Who Gives ‘Opportunism’ a Bad Name
That quip about Hayden’s opportunism was made decades ago by the late social-democrat intellectual Irving Howe, who believed that Hayden was campaigning in the 1960s to be “the New Left’s next Lenin.” It was a barbed, accurate, and insightful comment into what made the principal writer of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) “Port Huron Statement” tick.
Now, writing recently in the cover story of The Nation, Hayden sketches out what he means by the early concept “participatory democracy,” which became the guideline of the early SDS and which he tries to explain has now morphed into the present Occupy Wall Street. He explains his concept in this video:
There is no way to comb through all of the distortions, innuendos, and exaggerations in this long article, reworked from an introduction to a new book of twelve essays on the meaning of the now half-century old statement of SDS’s intent, which for some reason is not to be found at any online bookstore as yet. (You can read the original “Port Huron Statement” that was first published in 1962 for yourself.)
What is consistent with all of Hayden’s past years of activism (which you can read about here) is his desire to be on the cutting edge of whatever left-wing movement is current and which he still seeks to lead. Tying his old, early ’60s stance with his arguments today is the juvenile, mindless anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism of his youth, and an inability to comprehend how the mindset he held in 1962 led to SDS’s later embrace of totalitarianism and its descent into thuggish extremism.
What is most interesting about his new article, however, is his excitement about the president’s forthcoming election campaign and his obvious belief that it is the vehicle for fulfillment of the vision first announced in the Port Huron Statement (hereafter called PHS). That should not be surprising. Having left SDS soon after its birth, Hayden went on to move from organization to organization. First he favored community organizing in Newark, New Jersey, where he sought to organize an “interracial movement of the poor,” as he called it then, that would organize around demands for things like traffic lights in areas where they were needed. He believed that would develop into demands by a new movement to force city and state and then federal government to act upon their power.
From community organizing — which Hayden dropped as quickly as he began it — he moved to create his own group, “The Indo-China Peace Campaign,” which fought nationally for an end to the war in Vietnam, a cut-off of congressional funding to South Vietnam and Cambodia, and which favored a Communist victory in Southeast Asia. Hayden was able to do this because he had married the film star Jane Fonda, which not only allowed him to use her celebrity to his own advantage, but which gave him access to the money Fonda was making from her exercise videotapes, which were nationwide bestsellers. The profits from those tapes, I recall, were given directly to the organization’s funding. Together, he and Fonda traveled to North Vietnam, where he took a camera crew and came back with a propaganda film: Introduction to the Enemy. Hayden would write after his first trip to Vietnam that the Vietnamese Communists had created a “rice-roots democracy.” After the war’s end, when Joan Baez passed around a petition protesting the human-rights violations of the winning Communist side in Vietnam, Hayden denounced those who signed it as tools of the CIA.
Hayden leads movments the way a surfer leads a wave. He sees it, gets out in front of it, and rides it.
But surfers usually get a better ride.
It’s not just the SDS. Leftist ideology ALWAYS leads to totalitarianism. Always. It is incompatible with human freedom.
This is why it must be fought tooth and nail. NOT because we like the profits of capitalism better than the poverty of communism (and its kissing cousins fascism and socialism), but because it is ALWAYS totalitarian. It MUST be, because it seeks to compel behavior contrary to all human nature.
Kissing cousins is a great analagy. I have grown weary over the years trying to argue that Fascism and Nazism are not movements from the right but are overlapping each other with the multitude of ‘isms on the left. All are polar opposites of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin agreed that they were just using different words for the same form of government, perhaps a few cosmetic differences. I suspect that someone who knew where to look could find proof in writing, authored by those three.
In the late 1970s when I was a graduate student at Columbia, I photocopied some pages from Mein Kampf. I used white-out to remove the headers and footers indicating that the pages were from Hitler’s work.
I gave the pages to a fellow student who was a member of the CP-USA and a devout communist, along with his entire family going back generations. I asked wrote wrote the text. He was convinced its was taken from the Collected Works of Lenin.
Indeed. The differences are mere window dressing – they are the same at the core. Comprising an unholy trinity, they are one in essence.
Leftists will point to the historical conflict between the adherents of each cousin as proof that this assertion is false, but these are merely minor disagreements about the HOW and major disagreements about the WHO. They are never about the WHAT.
The WHAT is total state control. The STATE is elevated above the individual, and there are no RIGHTS, only privileges granted by the State, which may be revoked at the pleasure of the state.
Thus, none of these can ever be compatible with liberty.
VERY well put. Bravo.
Although, if I could add one thing….human nature is also endowed with envy, greed, apathy, laziness, cruelty, and hedonism. Communism is dependent on these human traits. What communism is, is contrary to POSITIVE human nature.
At 72 years old, he might think the OWS “movement” is his last best hope for a “hoorah.”
In reality, he is a narcissistic, stale Lefty has-been.
And speaking of narcissistic has-beens, he was married to Jane Fonda.
The “Occupy” movement appears inspired by Mao’s “cultural revolution” of the mid 1960′s. Tom Hayden and other Leftists must fantasize about being the leaders of the new “red guards”. I would recommend that all conservatives study that period of history it they really want to understand what is going on. You can be sure that the Leftists have already done so.
There’s nothing more pathetic than a doddering old Communist who still believes in the cause.
The only movement this fool should be is part of a Bears bowel movement
A question, Ron. How, exactly, does Barack Obama differ from Tom Hayden in terms of his associations & idealogy? My answer, for what its worth, is that Obama is at minimum a stealth Socialist. Hayden, clearly, is a stealth Communist who thanks to his age and the times, was not nearly as good at being stealthy as Barack. Just as much of a liar though. The really relevant question is not whether our president is a radical Socialist. That’s beyond doubt. The real question, based primarily on his associations and actions, is whether he is our first Communist president. I’m honestly not sure. I’d be curious to see whether these two ever crossed paths.
“The real question, based primarily on his associations and actions, is whether he is our first Communist president. I’m honestly not sure.”
Wonder no more, smokedaddy. What else could he be when his party of full of Communist Party members?
From the LA Times:
The voice of today’s GOP: Allen West says Democrats are commies
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-democrats-are-commies-20120411,0,1232324.story
You gotta love it!
By the way, it was the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, not mis print 1974.
Hayden reminds me of nothing so much as the reprobate running through the streets of Paris during Robespierre’s “reign of terror”…whining “Where is the mob?…I must find them…they need me…I am their leader”..once again the adage that there is no fool like an old fool is most applicable in Hayden’s case.
Ron, tell me how Hayden gets John Dewey to be a hero of the New Left. (Or do I really have to read Hayden’s piece itself, God help me?) I recall relentless hostility to Dewey among New Lefites at the UW in the late ’60s (Evan Stark was one). I am almost sure I argued a lot with Evan about him. Not that I am a big fan of Dewey’s, but I sure do not recall him being in the New Left pantheon, even with regard to the earlier Port Huron phase. Am I forgetting something?
Anyway, this is a great article. A real trip down memory lane.
Jon,
Right you are. But Dewey was somewhat on the political Left. My Commie high school claimed to be Deweyite. And of course, he led the commission to defend Trotsky in Mexico. Nevertheless, I think Hayden just had to come up with would-be heroes that he made up on the spot. He never said anything about them at the time.
This guy’s still alive?
– go lie down in the middle of Market Street.
Is Tom Hayden dishonest with himself, or is he just in full camouflage?
The staggering thing about small c communists is how they hate to be “found out” or “outed”. They ALL say they are not “communists”. They are lying and the PALM Press covers for them as they attempt the “soft overthrow” of capitalism, but are they really fooling themselves? Really?
I kinda tend to doubt it.
When a small c communist (this is a term I use to tweak the ugly face of Bill Ayers and his wife of no soul), go into hiding in plain sight, they twist themselves into all manner of pretzel forms and shape-shifting disguises.
Alan West recognizes that the Democratic Party is now really a far left arm of small c communism, and true to form, CNN immediately and reflexively through out the “McCarthy smear”…which is as predictable as the sunrise.
If you call a Communist a Communist, you are going to get the McCarthy smear from the PALM Press (propaganda and lies ministry). And from the small c communists themselves.
Look, I don’t fear small c communism as a debate issue. Let’s call the question and see if the American people wish to overthrow capitalism and replace it with the most vulgar form or totalitarianism in world history. I’m all for that debate.
What I despise when being fed my daily dose of treason by the Daily Duranty or CNN or MSNBC or any of the other PALM Press liars club, is the pretending that they aren’t doing the very thing that they are doing.
Not only are they liars, they are cowards as well. If you wish to overthrow capitalism and destroy the free market, at least have the courage of your convictions.
Selling the American people a pack of lies and a mountain of propaganda in order to fool them into putting you in the position of destroying their country against their will and without their consent is to crawl under a rock and lie in wait like a snake.
So, is Hayden fooling himself? I sincerely doubt it. It’s just more of the lying and treachery that comes with the small c decoder ring.
WE ought to be pointing at this administration and the Democratic liars and cowards and having the guts to do exactly what Alan West did. Call them what they are and detail what they are doing and why…and let the chips fall where they may.
Very succinct! Bravo!
The “New Left”, less so Hayden, reminds me of a remark of Issac Asimov….
“Life unlike chess, continues after checkmate…….”
or words to that effect.
Is the old commie still collecting alimony from Hanoi Jane? What a freakin’ weasel.
Ron, I think you might be off on one supporting fact: I don’t think the Jane Fonda workout videos are of the same era as Hayden’s Indo-China Peace Campaign. The war was over by 1975. VCRs didn’t become a mass market item until the late ’70s, and the Fonda workout videos probably postdate that by a few years more.
But just a nitpick on an otherwise fine summary of the old commie.
I see Old Potato Nose around my neighborhood in Santa Monica, from time to time. I have had to restrain myself on occasion from wringing his neck. And once upon a time I called him a son of a bitch to his face. Why, you ask? His little group of SDS fire bombed my school in the summer of 1968 and in the fall I found myself safe and sound in a prep school hundreds of miles away from danger. When I returned home things were never the same, my parents were getting a divorce and many unpleasantries were to follow. I always felt he and his ilk, robbed me of a part of my youth and I have always hated the Left for that, among other things.