Will the 60s ever end for Todd Gitlin?

Todd Gitlin, who does some decent media analysis work, has a whiny op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times: The urge to purge 04/09/06. He's apparently still smoldering over the fact that he was pushed out of a leadership role in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) back in the 1960s by the Weathermen. (Or was it Weathermen and Trotskyists?)

In his whine, he manages in the first paragraphs to promote the rightwing slander that liberals are unpatriotic as well as not-at-all-subtly equating liberals with communists. That used to be called Red-baiting. Until Republicans became the Reds. Anyway, Gitlin writes:

Sects are always in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You're either with us or with the evildoers.

This is nowhere more true than on the left. I've been rediscovering this cardinal principle since publishing a book a couple of months ago in which I argued what seemed to me to be the not-soterribly-controversial point that it was possible to be liberal and patriotic at the same time. A slightly iconoclastic idea, maybe, but for many of my longtime colleagues on the left, that was all it took. The night of the long knives had begun.

Why is the left so determined to eat its own? ...

Thus, in 1903, Lenin's Bolsheviks, advocating a Communist Party made up strictly of professional revolutionaries, broke from the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats, who, they said, had sold out true Marxism in favor of "bourgeois democracy." (Eventually, the Bolsheviks banned the Mensheviks.)

So too in 1969, the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground) determined that Students for a Democratic Society was being misled by the Stalinists of the Progressive Labor faction and by "movement creeps" like, well, myself. The urge to purge caused the collapse of a large, broad-based organization.

Todd, if you've become a born-again Republican, well, it's a free country. (On balance. Still. I'm pretty sure.) But as far as the oh-the-mean-liberals-are-picking-on-me whining: get over it, dude!

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