Didion on the New Left
Much of the late Joan Didion’s writing from the 1960s and ’70s is characterized by a pessimism about the New Left. She thought hippies and the rest of the counterculture were worthy of contempt, and she thought radicals like the Black Panther Party and various Marxist groups were both ludicrously far from power and frightening menaces to society.
Joan Didion visits the defunct Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, as recounted in her essay “Rock of Ages,” 1967. (Getty Images)
“[Michael Laski’s] place in the geography of the American Left is, in short, an almost impossibly lonely and quixotic one, unpopular, unpragmatic. He believes that there are ‘workers’ in the United States, and that, when the time comes, they will ‘arise,’ not in anarchy but in conscious concert, and he also believes that ‘the ruling class’ is self-conscious, and possessed of demonic powers. He is in all ways an idealist.”
“If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”
“At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. . . . [The hippies] are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.”
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