Tom Wolfe’s 1970 New Yorker article, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” was as acidic as anything that ever poured from his pen—and like Mark Twain before before him, Wolfe wrote with a pen warmed up in Hell.
Like so much else he wrote, Radical Chic was so on the nose for the moment, such a crystallization of specific people, places, and events, that, given the cyclical nature of things, it was simultaneously a documentary, a cautionary tale, and a prophecy.
You can read the whole article here, and if you’ve never read it you should, if only to see how much of what’s happening today was happening 54 years ago (and will surely happen again another half century hence).
But let’s go straight to the middle of Wolfe’s account of Leonard Bernstein’s eponymous party:
The emotional momentum was building rapidly when Ray “Masai” Hewitt, the (Black) Panthers’ Minister of Education and member of the Central Committee, rose to speak. Hewitt was an intense, powerful young man and in no mood to play the diplomacy game. Some of you here, he said, may have some feelings left for the establishment, but we don’t. We want to see it die. We’re Maoist revolutionaries, and we have no choice but to fight to the finish. For about 30 minutes Masai Hewitt laid it on the line. He referred now and again to “that [motherfucker] Nixon” and to how the struggle would not be easy, and that if buildings were burned and other violence ensued, that was only part of the struggle that the power structure had forced the oppressed minorities into. Hewitt’s words tended to provoke an all-or-nothing reaction. A few who remembered the struggles of the Depression were profoundly moved, fired up with a kind of nostalgie de that old-time religion. But more than one Park Avenue matron was thrown into a Radical Chic confusion. The most memorable quote was: “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?”
Yes, just suppose.
While the entitled young things of America’s elite universities continue to intoxicate themselves on the heady fumes of rebellion and revolution and sticking it to the man—the man in the case being The Jew—the lesson to be drawn from Tom Wolfe is that we can comfort ourselves that this, too, will pass.
But not until these idiot children and their enablers are shown what’s what.
There are excitable elements everywhere, these days, so let me say explicitly that being “shown what’s what” is not a euphemism. It is not code for having their faces curb stomped. I mean only that the current hysteria will pass the way all current hysterias pass into obscurity, more likely to be remembered as a fit of collective insanity than a civilizational turning point:
“Remember when the idiot kids at Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley, and MIT were supporting a terrorist group that oppressed women and homosexuals and called openly for genocide, and were harassing and assaulting their own fellow students who happened to be Jewish?”
“Vaguely, but remind me: what were Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley, and MIT?”
America’s answer to the radicals of Nixon’s first term—including the trendy, swishy socialites described by Wolfe—was to hand Nixon a landslide re-election in 1972: he got 60.7% of the popular vote and thumped McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College.
Nixon even won in Washington D.C.
So much for radical chic.
It clearly came as a shock. As New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael noted after the election, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
The overwhelming majority of the country had voted for Nixon, but the “rather special world” of a New Yorker film critic included only a single one of them. She didn’t know who or where they all were, but she could feel them.
A dozen years later, even the youngest of the 1970 radicals were established in careers, starting families, buying houses, running for office, anchoring news programs, and writing and editing newspapers. They’d been horrified by Reagan’s defeat of Carter in 1980 and had spent the four years of Reagan’s first term expressing their contempt in ways familiar to anyone who lived through the period from 2016 to 2020. America nevertheless doubled down on Reagan just as they had on Nixon, with yet another emphatic rejection of the left’s hysteria. Reagan won re-election by an even larger landslide than Nixon had: the Democrat Walter “Fritz” Mondale picked up only 13 Electoral College votes: those of his home state of Minnesota and Washington DC.
Recent history would therefore seem to suggest that the far left’s fever will break in about 6½ months—but this is complicated by the identity of the presumptive Republican nominee, who already broke the pattern by failing to win re-election in 2020.
Donald Trump obviously isn’t an incumbent this time around (although he is running for a second term, which is weird), and he’s facing the prospect of criminal convictions and even jail time.
As insane as it may sound to anyone too young to remember the elections of ‘84 or ‘72, however, the rabid contempt for Donald Trump isn’t significantly different from that directed against Nixon and Reagan by their political adversaries. New tactics are in play, but one could make the case that Watergate was just the left’s first clumsy (but successful) experiment with lawfare.
But ‘72 and and ‘84 may not be the right comparisons for 2024.
The 1968 election seems much more relevant.
The primary season had been one of the darker periods of American political history: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy—the clear favorite for the Democratic nomination—had both been assassinated. The Vietnam war was dividing the country. The Democrats of the deep south were so outraged by the civil rights movement that they fled their own party to support former Alabama Governor George Wallace, who was running on the segregationist “American Independent” ticket.
Richard Nixon was a comeback candidate: a former favorite for the presidency, he had been defeated in 1960 by the upstart John F. Kennedy by the slimmest of margins: Kennedy beat him 49.72% to 49.55% in the popular vote, 303-219 in the Electoral College.
The far left was at peak derangement in 1968, and their insanity was beamed out to the country on live television during every night of the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—a city that had already been shaken twice that year by riots, and whose mayor, Richard Daley, had given orders during the second of them to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters.
The Democratic National Convention of August 1968 lives in infamy to this day as a low point in American politics. Even CBS News says so. (Although naturally, in their telling, the only “good guys” in Chicago were the media.)
The activists swarming the city were determined to raise a ruckus and its Democratic Mayor “Boss” Daley was determined to keep things orderly. Both sides took things a little too far, producing a shit show of epic proportions.
(But the ratings were through the roof!)
In spite of all that, Richard Nixon only defeated the eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, by half a million votes out of more than 71 million votes cast. The Electoral College was a little more lopsided, giving Nixon 301, Humphrey 191, and Wallace 46 votes.
The 2024 Democratic National Convention will, like its 1968 precursor, be held in Chicago. It will be held in late August, as it was in 1968.
The most extreme elements of the left are already planning to disrupt the proceedings.
A third party candidate is once again in the mix—the namesake son of the very same Kennedy assassinated in 1968—and is currently polling at levels above those achieved by Wallace.
If 2024 plays out like 1968, we can expect a summer of riots, a shit show in Chicago, and a strong showing by RFK Jr. conspiring to give a narrow win to Donald Trump.
But the past isn’t always prologue: sometimes it’s just a distraction.
There are as many important differences between 2024 and 1968 as there are similarities: but the most volatile element is exactly the same: the complete derangement of the far left.
Radical chic is now intifada chic: sympathy for the Viet Cong is now sympathy for Hamas. The pampered children chanting solidarity with the thugs who murdered, raped, tortured, mutilated, and kidnapped civilians on October 7 are doing so with the encouragement of faculty who chanted solidarity with the Viet Congback in ’68.
The American people will have to show them what’s what, again, in November.
April 24 was the birthday of Chipper Jones (1972), Doug Clifford (1945), Barbra Streisand (1942), Jill Ireland (1936), and Shirley MacLaine (1934).
The 24th was Genocide Memorial Day in Armenia, National Day in Niger, and Arbor Day in the USA.
April 25 is ANZAC Day in Australia, New Zealand, and Tonga. It's Sinai Liberation Day in Egypt, Flag Day in Denmark's Faroe Islands, Liberation Day in Italy, Revolution Day in Portugal, and Flag Day in Swaziland.
Today is the birthday of Renee Zellweger (1969), Talia Shire (1946), Bjorn Ulvaeus (1945), Al Pacino (1940), Meadowlark Lemon (1932), Paul Mazursky (1930), Ella Fitzgerald (1918), and Edward R. Murrow (1908).
Happy little Friday!
© 2024 The Moron’s Almanac
I chanced to reread Radical Chic a few weeks ago and can only support the exhortation that everyone should treat themselves to Wolfe’s magnificent flaying of the insufferably smug liberal elite of years past. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it sure can rhyme!
The parallels with 1968 are in some ways almost too neat. A weakened Democrat incumbent facing off against a Republican who is the most hated man in the world by the left, and Robert Kennedy trying to upset the Democratic primary. And a Democrat convention in Chicago just waiting to turn ugly.
Far out, Man!
Except where can we find a stylist like Tom Wolfe these days?