Ideas and Emotions Behind the Protests

As debate rages in Washington over the balance of nuclear arsenals and the effects of drastically rear ranged spending priorities, the pace of political activity has picked up considerably this semester at Harvard. The Crimson recently interviewed five prominent campus activists from the Right and the left in an effort to expose the ideas and emotions behind the demonstrations against University investments in South Africa and the rallies in favor of a U.S. arms build-up.

Raul M. Barrett conducted two interviews, one with Jamin B. Raskin `83 and Michael T. Anderson `83, organizers for the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee and the Committee on Central America, and a second with Conservative Club members Mark A. Sauter `82 and Ted Higgins `83 and club President Christoper S. Forman `83. Sauter edits the conservative bi-weekly, The Salient, and Higgins heads the Massachusetts College Republican Union. Following are excerpts with the questions paraphrased in most cases.

The Left

Crimson: How do you view yourselves politically?

Anderson: I think "radical" is as good a word as any. It really involves nothing more specific than believing that people relate in ways they are unconscious of, that are unhealthy, alienating, and self-destructive. And it's the basic belief that that has a lot more to do with politics than the pop culture that has come up in the late Seventies.

Raskin: When Mike and I call ourselves radical, we mean it in the formal sense, going to the roots and getting to the roots of problems. I think we adhere pretty closely to the old Socialist formulation of trying to abolish the power of man over man.

Crimson: How would you assess the political scene at Harvard and the widely accepted idea that there is a rising tide of conservatism on campuses?

Anderson: I think there's a latent instinct to the left in most students....to the extent that few students would have voted for Reagan, most students read Doonesbury and smile. There's a sense of passive knowledge about what things are about that's not that different from the collective awareness of the Sixties. The problem is there are other things that are more compelling that are on their minds.... You can't blame someone for wanting to get into a good professional school, to get into a good firm.

I don't think the new breed of student is necessarily conservative. I think the people who are on the political right at Harvard are looked on by the average Harvard student as much more freaks than even we are....I think what's more typical of the new breed is that people think that problems are essentially individual. Problems to do with competition, problems to do with career success--there's no such thing as a collective solution any more. And that's the error we're trying to attack.... What disturbs me pretty profoundly about the new breed of student is that he or she doesn't know how horrible it is to sell out. What that really means.

Raskin: I would say there is a direct relationship between the faltering of the American economy and the retrenchment of American students in terms of activism. The people are obsessively concerned--and rightfully so, I know that's true for myself--about having enough money to pay for college and to pay for expenses, and that's an incredible diversion of energy. I think it's things like cuts in the student loans, the draft and intervention that will bring people back into the street. When they realize that their personal problems are really political in nature.

Anderson: Although it is kind of a sad statement to say that you have to have intervention, you have to have conscription before there is a student left, if you compare where we're out now in terms of consciousness to where we were in '62-'63, we're a lot further along. People, even if they're not out in the streets yet, have some sense of where El Salvador is or for that matter Guatemala.

Crimson: What are your reactions to those students associated with conservatism at Harvard?

Raskin: I take it as a good sign that there has been something of a revitalization of the Right at Harvard because at least it shows that people are taking a side; we know where those people stand. I think more and more people are going to have to take a side in the real battle for the heart and soul of America which is shaping up for the Eighties.... They are obsessed with totalitarianism, but what they forget about is fascism. Go ask the president of the Conservative Club if he thinks there's fascism in the world today and he will say no. But how else can you explain the government of El Salvador, the government of Argentina, of Guatemala, of the Philippines, of south Africa. There is fascism in the world today and America is supporting, financing and subsidizing it... I don't think you can turn your back on Guatemala and say. "Look at Leonid Brezhnev; he's such a bad gay." It's a smoke screen.

Anderson: I don't think the issue of Right versus Left on this campus is comparing Left versus Right-wing atrocities. That's not the point; that leads to relatively stupid quibbling....If we're talking about South Africa, the issue isn't apartheid, the issue isn't cheap labor; it becomes Angola.

Raskin: The ideology of The Salient is that America can do nothing wrong abroad and nothing right in America.... They want to stop the role of government as an enemy of inequality and injustice in America, but they want America to be all over the globe in support of corporate interests. They want to make the world safe for big business.

Crimson: But if you do ask them, they argue that they do not support big business and what they want is more emphasis on individual rights.

Anderson: Who are they trying to kid? If you're an individual at Harvard who has the chance to go to business school and develop yourself and your own potential given yourself and what's been handed to you, then yes. American liberty is exactly the kind of liberty you want to be defending. I think the difference between the Right and the Left here and elsewhere is that the Left at least feels the compulsion to care about people who aren't in a unique situation, namely that of being a well-off student at an Ivy League university.

Raskin: How can they say they're for individual rights when they oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, when they oppose the right of abortion, when they oppose affirmative action, when they oppose any progressive measure that has tried to further the cause of individuals in our society, specifically those individuals who have traditionally been excluded from those institutions which conservatives back.

Crimson: How would you describe the origins of you political orientation?

Anderson: If anything has radicalized me, it's been watching my father try to use his position in the FBI to do something good. He works on civil rights cases and he works on brutality cases, and he's got the best intentions in the world If there's one truth to radical doctrine, it's that most evil in the world is institutionally caused and in some sense inevitable without that institution. There's no way I can see myself wallowing in the kind of impotence I see my father in, trying to make the best out of an inherently bad situation. There's also something about being at Harvard University that's an inherent radicalizing force. South Africa, more than anything else has convinced me that big institutions like Harvard are incapable of changing things themselves. They have to be forced into it from the outside.

Raskin: (whose father quit a national security post in the Kennedy Administration in opposition to the Vietnam War and remains a prominent leftist writer and researcher.) I grew up in a very radicalized family I think that had a profound affect on me, but like Mike. I found myself increasingly radicalized by being at Harvard and understanding the institutional sources of oppression and injustice....It's been a learning experience in that morality is really put second on the just, or third or fourth, by the Corporation.

Crimson: You express some optimism about the Left here, what do you see for the future?

Raskin: The first development then is that the Left is really becoming cohesive, people are putting aside minor ideological or partisan quibbles and realizing that we have a common task now. The second is that there is much more receptivity to radical ideas now.

Anderson: I would disagree about there being unity among the student Left right here and now. We are still very fragmented. I think. To a large extent, I think the student Left exists only among the people who are committed for some particular, individual reason and not because of any collective groundswell. I think that when the Left makes its resurgence, it will be in response to a number of specific events: the reinstatement of the draft, escalated American involvement in Central American, or a specific freakish issue popping up, like student loans.

Crimson: What of the problem of those in the middle who say that both sides are sounding off without knowing what to really do about anything?

Anderson: I've got no illusions about what people think of me when I'm tabling on Central America. What they'll think of me is someone who's making noise after all, what's the point. They might be sympathetic in principle, but the last thing they've got time for is to come to a meeting or to table themselves. I'm not worried about that because I think that most of us in the movement as it is now see ourselves as waiting for that time a few years from now when people can't afford to go to the libraries, when people can't afford to go to the libraries, when people have to start thinking in a very immediate way about [what] politics is going to mean for them....

At Harvard people will look through their Harvard brochure or the Harvard Gazette and see Archie Epps or Derek Bok and think of themselves as at a liberal institution--that we're at an effectively enlightened place. If there are problems with America, these are problems that exist out in the sticks that the Eastern establishment will be able to deal with. It's a very sort of complacent, moderate-to-liberal feeling that everything is all right if I only get to law school and study under Archibald Cox....When SASC [Southern Africa Solidarity Committee] gets its literature thrown out in the middle of the night by Epps' assistant and then he comes back and claims that it was all a mistake, that is as patent a lie as there could possibly be. People in SASC, people reading The Indy and The Crimson get a glimmering of the realities beneath the facade. Part of what radicalism is about is breaking the illusions that Harvard creates and creates very well.

Crimson: Do people have a responsibility to act, one way or the other?

Anderson: I'd say yes and no. Yes, I think people should be doing what we're doing. What we're doing is right. What we're doing creates a better world for human beings than what the Right's doing or even what the present system's doing. On the other hand, I don't expect someone whose only desire is to get into medical school right now to wake up right now and go to a SASC meeting.... They'll come around when the pressure mounts.

Raskin: People have a responsibility to do what they can where they can. For example, for the students who are going to medical school, there is an undergraduate group forming now of students opposed to the arms race, the medical consequences of the arms race. They've put time and energy into reversing militarism and reversing the arms race. it's not so much that we want people to be doing what we're doing specifically, it's that people in their different departments in their different areas work to advance progressive goals.

Crimson: More on the future:

Anderson: I think a solid half of the campus is on our side. They may think we go a little too far, we're a little too extreme, we make a little too much noise, but they're with us. That's not to say the other half is in the Conservative Club. The other half may just be completely apolitical. It's that half that I think will get interested in the next few years.

The Right

Crimson: How do you label yourselves politically?

Forman: There's a real danger with identifying yourself with any label at all because of the people with whom you will then be identified. I've run into problems calling myself "conservative" being president of thins club, because of people like (Senators Jesse) Helms and (Strom) Thurmond and (Reverend Jerry) Falwell, with whom I'd never want to be identified....

As far as my own beliefs, not New Right, certainly, not libertarian, as Ted calls himself. I first started getting more interested in politics when I started reading George Will five or six years ago, and I see him, in a sense, as my political mentor.

Sauter: I would characterize myself generally as someone with conservative-libertarian tendencies, but I don't think it's necessarily incumbent upon me to follow any line strictly, and I often have beliefs that surprise people....On affirmative action, I think that there are times when you need goals; I have many friends who don't believe in goals. In terms of sexual matters, my views are very different. I have no objection to people engaging in homosexual activities, but I am alarmed at homosexual culture, the attempt to make their sex lives into a culture or an ideology.

Higgins: My general outlook is to support the advancement of individual liberty, particularly keeping a very, very skeptical eye on the government....This may sound like an endorsement of the Libertarian Party; it's not. Again, I shy away from labels. On today's spectrum. I'm sort of between conservative and libertarian. I think what's really affected my thinking is seeing what the pat answer, are to problems....Then scratching the surface a little more and seeing in almost all cases problems are caused by some government initiating a problem itself.

Crimson: What are the origins of your political ideas?

Forman: I've become a voracious reader of political commentary. I subscribe to about 10 or 12 magazines, most of them on the left, and I just try to read as much as I can. Besides that, I try to get as much news as I can first hand, watching the news conferences: I've got a short-wave radio, with which I pick up the news in the foreign countries from their point of view. So I look at all the information, and by and large, those who call themselves conservatives, I would say Will and (William F.) Buckley to a certain extent, make more sense than those who call themselves liberals.

Sauter: I'm a voracious consumer of news: I still am. When I came to school I became involved with SASC (Southern Africa Solidarity Committee), because through a variety of experiences I was extremely upset with the activities of the South African government. And I all of a sudden realized that the people involved with that group really didn't give a shit, or didn't care as much as they might like to have other people think they care about the individuals in the situation....They were willing to say there should be a bloody revolution and five million people will get killed and after that there will be a nice Marxist government or socialist government. And their priorities I thought were strange....I think it's one of the most reprehensible regimes on earth because it has a constitution which infringes on people's rights purely on the basis of their color. On the other hand, I think the Soviet Union is a much greater threat to the rights of all people.

Crimson: What is the conservative vision of the future?

Higgins: People on the Left have some amorphous idea; they have one but they couldn't name it The classic example is the ERA: people do not have any idea what would happen if that were passed. And if you ask them. "Well okay, I believe in equal rights for women, but do you think that Smith College should have to pay taxes because it discriminates against men?" And they don't particularly have any answer for that question I should hope the future would be some sort of progression from absolute monarchy, theocrisy, through more individual rights oriented that's a terrible thing to say "individual-rights oriented" I sound like Al Haig or something.

Sauter: They (liberals) want a society where children can grow up happy and free without acne. We want all the same things However, they say the way to get those things is to have the government to intrude upon our lives.

We say it really is worth it to grapple with the problems of say, racism, one of the more difficult issues because it involves dealing with people's minds, their perceptions But we say, how do you go about this And we say, no, the government shouldn't do it The government shouldn't discriminate against one race in order to help out another race.

Forman: It really does go back to individual responsibilities. I would put the emphasis on responsibilities rather than on rights It goes back to the fact that we are living in a community, that we have responsibilities to treat others in certain ways, in non racist ways, that by living in the state that does things....we have a responsibility to do things in return.

Crimson: The Salient, generally has had a warm reaction to President Reagan's policies What is your assessment?

Higgins: The President definitely has values, does have definite ideas about what a good policy is for the long run. He has stuck to them rather faithfully. The thing that I find most alarming, and I think you could call it the Jim Bakerization of the government; that wing of the party has to a very large extent taken over the White House. The Ronald Reagan wing is not in control....Main Street may have won this election, but unfortunately to a large extent. Wall Street is taking it over.

Forman: In general, I think Reagan is a very kindhearted, well-intentioned man. He's not out to get anyone: Blacks, poor, whoever....At the same time I think he's a fairly simplistic man Jimmy Carter was a very intelligent man, and we saw where he got us. But I quoted the remark the Reagan made to [U.S. Arms Negotiator] Paul Nitze: "Well, you know, communists are communists, no matter where they are." And it's just not true, and in a way it's dangerous.

Crimson: On liberal campus activism.

Higgins: The so-called issues of the Left are like hemlines. They go up and down and change every year. Last year, the crucial issue was El Salvador. The previous year, the crucial issue for all time was nuclear power. The spring before that, the crucial issue for all time was South Africa. You have to question just how deeply concerned someone is with an issue when he's talking about it as the most important thing today, when next week or six months from now something completely different is the most important thing.

Sauter: Let's talk about substantive issue. I meet with my Vietnamese friends and they say. "The Left has not learned a lesson from Vietnam in this country"....I'm willing to say that most people who marched against the war in Indochina were well-intentioned, most, not all....but what lessons have they drawn? Have they drawn the lesson that their actions affected millions of lives. Harvard student actions have affected millions of lives. They are indirectly responsible, but responsible nonetheless, for millions of dead Cambodians and for hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps in Vietnam, for a general disintegration of law and order, democracy, and human rights in Indochina.

Crimson: On the peace movement, specifically:

Sauter: We're convinced that the peace movement will drastically increase the chances of nuclear war....It does not put into perspective that people who believe in producing more nuclear weapons believe in producing more nuclear weapons to avoid a nuclear war....They talk about a nuclear freeze, and [what] they never give reference to is [whether] a freeze [is] possible; if there is an imbalance now between the forces of the Soviet Union and America, would a freeze he more or less likely to create an imbalance and a greater potential of nuclear war? Also, it never deals with the very basic question of, is there anything worth risking, and I say risking, a nuclear war for?.....I think there are things worth risking a nuclear war for.

Higgins: You have to look at the relationship between increasing the number of nuclear weapons and the probability of having nuclear war. it's not simple and direct, as the Left would like us to believe. Left-wingers, particularly around here, are very big on simplistic cause-and-effect chains, in the South Africa tradition, for instance Does it ever occur to them that divestiture from South Africa might not be the best thing, that having U.S. investment in south Africa because of the foreign policies or the job opportunities made by American companies might he the best peaceful means to undermine apartheid.

Crimson: On campus politics:

Forman: We have got plenty of liberalism on campus, and I have stated all along that my purpose in the club and our purpose in the club and our purpose with the paper is to provide some balance, is to put forward some arguments on the other side just in order to raise consciousness, to get people thinking.

Higgins: To get people thinking about things as issues that they originally thought of as settled facts.

Saute: It's amazing how many people we convince when we speak to them....I find that when I speak to people about issues or I write about them, they will say. I never thought about that that way. "And then they'll say. "That point has a lot of validity," and then they'll think about it further.

Crimson: Is there a rising tide of conservatism on campus?

Sauter: I think so. While we were organizing rallies about Afghanistan a year ago. Reagan was out campaigning, and the people were just growing sick, morally sick, over the consequences of having liberal Jimmy Carter in office, over the consequences of having liberal policies, leftist policies that were not really helping poor people who are not dealing with the threats of the totalitarian movement. It was giant wave, and of course this wave is going to come over campuses; it came over during the elections, and even the little trickle that's come onto Harvard....

Higgins: Yeah. You have to break it down into several components. There are an increasing number of hard-core conservatives, people who are converts. There are also a number who are coming out of the closet. Now I've been in the minority ever since I've had a political viewpoint, and I'm used to being called a "fascist." A lot of people don't like to be called "fascists." Two and three years ago they wouldn't have come out and admitted that they were conservatives.

There are also....people who while not necessarily hard-core Reaganites, would be very skeptical and very dissatisfied with the liberal orthodoxy and are willing to listen to some of our viewpoints and agree with some of our viewpoints but in many cases just didn't know what that they were there. Then there is the real red herring what a lot of people point at and think is rising campus conservatism, this rising, this nauseating preppydom. Those people aren't conservatives, Those people are drunks.