They Say They Want a Revolution

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/they-say-they-want-a-revolution.html

Version 0 of 1.

LONDON — I don’t have an ideological view of Karl Marx. Sometimes he is right, sometimes wrong, sometimes both at the same time.

Marx’s oft-quoted line that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, is a good example. Occasionally when history repeats itself it is farcical, but usually when a society repeats the same historic mistake it is still tragic.

Take the current presidential election. Yet again, a specter is haunting the youthful left, the myth that there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. A solid minority are considering voting for a third-party candidate or not at all. Once again older voters are pointing out the obvious: that backing a third-party candidate is throwing away your vote and will lead to the election of Donald J. Trump.

That argument won’t matter to the young. They won’t mind a Trump presidency because they are sure it will bring the revolution several steps closer. That’s a line of reasoning that has been around a long time. I first heard it during the presidential campaign in 1980. “I’m voting for John Anderson instead of Jimmy Carter,” said an old college friend. Why? I replied. It means Reagan will win. “Good. It will bring the revolution closer.”

I haven’t seen my friend in years. I hope he’s not still waiting.

My friend and I were there the first time … and we didn’t even have the vote. Autumn 1968. Freshmen at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. The voting age was still 21, and all an 18-year-old could do was wrap his or her mouth around the word “revolution.”

We ached for revolution the way we ached for sex, hormonally, and were ignorant of what the act entails when done right. We didn’t understand that revolution is a form of civil war. It is not a face you put on a T-shirt. When you put the image of Che or Marx on a T-shirt, revolution, like sex, becomes commodified, a thrill to be sold.

In America, that’s how things played out. In other parts of the world, 1968 really was about revolution. The week I started college, a crowd of mostly university students on a peaceful protest were fired on in Mexico City. Between 30 and 300 — there has never been an accurate tally — were killed. That same week a Roman Catholic civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, was violently suppressed. The incident is usually taken as one of the founding incidents of “the Troubles.”

I don’t mean to be cynical about the United States. Plenty of youthful blood was shed in those years. I knew people who made life-altering commitments to “revolution,” even when it became clear that in America it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. They accepted that revolution is a long game with a very uncertain outcome, and I wonder if those thinking of voting third party in order to bring the day of revolt closer have the courage for that commitment. I didn’t.

That week in October 1968, when I started college, another 18-year-old was on the streets in Derry during the violence. By the time I graduated in 1972, he was living underground, a senior figure in the Provisional I.R.A.

When I met him in 1994, Martin McGuinness was decisively stepping away from those decades of violence. It was the day the I.R.A. finally declared a cease-fire — a hurdle overcome in the political negotiations that led ultimately to the Good Friday agreement.

Mr. McGuinness’s role in the I.R.A. is still shrouded in secrecy; I was there to interview him, briefly, for NPR. We spoke in a grubby room full of discarded boxes and old office furniture. I asked him the obvious questions, but I remember two things: listening to him and thinking, this guy is only three months older than I am and look at the things he has done; Mr. McGuinness, unguarded and unsure, asking, how do you think we’re doing?

I thought he meant, how did I think Sinn Fein was handling the media attention it was getting. The Irish Republican leaders were a secretive crew, and they now had to deal with hundreds of journalists from all over the world. I also got the sense he meant himself personally, “How am I doing?” He was taking the first step from being a revolutionary — or terrorist, you decide which — toward becoming a legitimate politician, a disorienting change for a middle-aged man.

It was a very human moment. He had hazarded his life on the violent overthrow of the existing order, and now after 20 years was — by his actions, not his words — acknowledging that it had been the wrong tactic. That day at the end of August 1994 I felt the need — ’68er to ’68er — to assure him he was doing just fine. The words were awkward. I wanted to go deeper. A Sinn Fein press officer came for him, and the interview was over.

Today, Mr. McGuinness is deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, and completely at home in the impure world of mainstream party politics.

I have interviewed other men and women my age who were part of revolutionary movements and imprisoned and tortured for it. While we spoke of revolution in America, swigging beer and withholding our votes, these people had walked it like we talked it.

I wonder if young supporters of Bernie Sanders and their peers have the patience for the hard work of change. I don’t think it was revolutionary, but it was incredibly radical for a Brooklyn Jew to move to Vermont in that extraordinary year of 1968. Vermont was a Republican state. It took more than a decade for Mr. Sanders to figure out how to win an election there.

I hope that the reported one-third of voters ages 18 to 29 who say they will vote for a third-party candidate are asking themselves if they know the difference in price between T-shirt revolution and the real thing.