Utopia's Return.

Growing up, I have often lamented that I missed out on the zeitgeist of the 1960s: its frothy exuberance, its moral drama, its sex, drugs, and rock and roll. For better or worse, these are all elements of the decade for which I feel temperamentally well suited. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I even once wrote a fairly maudlin poem on this theme, which was basically a list of things I'd like to have done if I'd lived through the 1960s. It included such items as sitting around the television with my family when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, sneaking a college sophomore out of her dormitory window, looking forward to the next Beatles album, and heckling Robert McNamara by raucously singing Bobby Darin's "Mac the Knife."

But most of all, I'd like to have known the utopian exhilaration of the 1960s--to have been part of a generation that believed, as Paul Berman recalled, "that we ourselves--the teenage revolutionaries, freaks, hippies and students, together with our friends and leaders who were five or ten years older and our allies around the world--stood at the heart of a new society." Although many retired activists look back at the new left's overblown rhetoric with an impish sense of chagrin, I've always found the idealism with which so many young people tackled the world's problems seductive, if also sadly distant. Let's face it: Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of a "beloved community"--once an animating force behind the civil rights movement--strikes most people as the folly of a bygone era. "Be Realistic. Demand the Impossible"--a worldwide rallying cry for young militants in 1968, today carries all of the sound and fury of a bumpersticker on an ailing Volkswagen.

Worse yet, whenever I've raised these sentiments with aging 1960s radicals, their attitude is almost always one of agreement, as if to say, "Yeah, the 1960s were great all right! Tough you weren't there." (Or, alternately, they just go ahead and actually say this--as did the late Abbie Hoffman commenting on the 1960s: "Can it happen again? No way. It is never going to happen again. The music is never going to be that good, the sex is never going to be that free, the dope is never going to be that cheap.")

However, if Hoffman were still around, he would likely be pleased with the way 1960s-style politics have been rekindled lately in a new wave of anti-corporatism. It has made its presence felt everywhere, from the "Battle of Seattle" (protests at the 2000 World Trade Organization conference) to the "battle of the ballots" that marked the 2000 presidential election. Certainly Ralph Nader's campaign recalled some of the utopian spirit of the 1960s. As Micah Sifry commented, Nader's soldout, October 15, rally at Madison Square Garden could only be described as "John Lennon Meets C-Span." (Although, as Sifry also suggested "Imagine if workers controlled their own pension funds" doesn't quite rise to the level of Lennon's poetry.) Were we to reduce the entire constellation of activist yearnings to a simple soundbite, it would undoubtedly be "Power to the People"--a familiar refrain of enormous integrity.

Indeed, it has lately begun to seem that reports of utopia's death may have been greatly exaggerated. Just maybe, I've been thinking, utopia has merely been cryogenically preserved (kind of like Austin Powers) and now is ready to spring back to life in the 2000s.

Certainly the parallels between today's globalistas and the early new left are clear enough. To begin with the obvious, in both instances alienated young people started their own movement at a time when the adult left has seemed (how to say it nicely?) fatigued. Moreover, just as many 1960s radicals became active in a time of unparalleled prosperity, today's college-based protesters enjoy a certain measure of comfort as they look askance toward the world they inherit.

Similarities in style abound as well. Like their forebears, today's activists have begun fashioning their own "movement culture"--a shared cosmology, klan, and joie de vivre that is acutely sensitive to what Sifry calls the "hucksterism, dishonesty, greed, short-sightedness, [and] inauthenticity of American mainstream culture--which is to say, corporate culture." Although it's true that many of the rebellious instincts of the 1960s have been engulfed by the dominant culture, we should make no mistake: today's activists are still forming cogent critiques of materialism and questioning the presumptions of Middle America.

But most encouraging of all, today's protesters are learning once again to dream big dreams. They know that meaningful social change is never going to happen so long as the left remains captivated by the condescending, real-world cynicism of former radicals like Todd Gitlin, who recently blasted young activists for a "purist approach to politics" and opined that "the only land ahead is the compromised land." But surely Gitlin knows that successful social movements thrive on their tensions between insiders and outsiders, between compromisers and absolutists, and that third parties often leave their mark without actually winning elections.

Obviously, it's too early to tell whether this fledgling movement will blossom into a mass democratic effort. But as we know from Marcuse, utopia doesn't always have be a particular type of society; it can also be a process, a liberated way of thinking, an exercise in collective self-definition. In addition to staging successful demonstrations and winning a string of legal victories, today's activists have made a cultural achievement of the first order. They've begun raising their expectations, thinking without limits, and cultivating a measure of political self-respect--what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "sense of somebodiness"--upon which social movements depend. And in their ever-present concern for how they reach their own decisions and build consensus around them, they've already started prefiguring what a new society might look like.

Yes, the 1960s was a remarkable time. So densely packed were those years that, as Geoffrey O'Brien recalled, in 1966 two Esquire writers went so far as to suggest that someone should just "call the decade off," on the theory that enough had already happened. (One wonders what they were thinking by, say, the end of 1968!) Moreover, Abbie Hoffman was probably right to suggest that there was something irretrievably novel and exciting about his own youth culture.

Today's activists, however, are trying to accomplish something much greater than liberated recreational opportunities; they're trying to rescue utopia from cultural oblivion--to channel the impulse for a society of surpassing splendor into a secular struggle for social justice. And isn't that what made the 1960s so great in the first place?

John McMillian is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at Columbia University and coeditor, with Timothy Patrick McCarthy, of The Radical Reader: A Documentary Anthology of the American Radical Tradition (forthcoming from New Press).