When I was 22 years old, Nathan Glazer, the Harvard professor of education and sociology who died this past January, stood for everything I was against. It was 1964, the year of the Berkeley student revolt, and Glazer, then teaching at that university, wrote that he was “filled with foreboding” by the actions of the student demonstrators. Just one more old-fashioned reactionary, I thought at the time, one who failed to understand, as Bob Dylan had sung the year before, that the “answer was blowing in the wind.”
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Over the years, my ideas have changed; although I never followed former colleagues such as David Horowitz into the far right, I did come to locate myself somewhere in the middle left of the spectrum. We all, I came to believe, change, or at least should. Did Glazer? At one level, the answer is obvious: On some of the most important issues of his day, Glazer was sensitive to evidence and willing to change his mind, none more famously than his eventual endorsement of a soft form of multiculturalism. This was one of his most admirable qualities, but it ought also to be stressed that on the single most important political issue of our era, Glazer displayed a remarkable consistency throughout his life: He was an opponent of totalitarianism and authoritarianism whether it took form on the right or on the left.
Last year I published a book called The Politics of Petulance in which I identified Glazer and his fellow intellectuals as “mature liberals.” “I like the idea of ‘mature liberals,'” Nat emailed me shortly before he died, “despite my identification as a neocon I still consider myself a liberal. But neocon now has become the identification of an activist and belligerent stance in foreign policy I don't share. I will call myself a “mature liberal” in future, if I have occasion to call myself anything…” Alas, no such occasion presented itself.
Mature liberalism understood something that I, in my 22-year-old wisdom, had failed to grasp. Had I more fully appreciated the historical horrors of both Nazism and Stalinism, I would have had a far greater sense of why Glazer and his friends took the positions they did. In the end, I think Glazer was wrong to see both the student movement and the black power movements as incipient forms of fascism, especially now that the genuine forms of fascism, alas, are making themselves felt around the world. But with hindsight, I can more fully understand why he was mistaken. Emotionalism, as Max Weber had so brilliantly suggested in “Politics as a Vocation,” can be deadly for liberal values. In his critique of the movements of the 1960s, Glazer was not defending conservatism so much as trying to protect a clearer path to liberalism.
