Of course, there was a great deal of playacting among the revolutionaries as well. Abbie Hoffman, the co-founder of the yippies (the Youth International Party) along with Jerry Rubin, was the son of prosperous Jewish parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. The product of private schools — where he was a troublemaker from the start, no doubt due in part to his bipolar disorder — Hoffman attended Brandeis University, where he studied under the New Left intellectual icon Herbert Marcuse. Hoffman bought into Marcuse's view that bourgeois America was "radically evil" and that it had to be radically challenged as a result. But Hoffman had something over Marcuse, Rudd, Hayden, and the rest: he could be legitimately funny about his mission (though not nearly as funny as he thought he was). His was a funny fascism, a naughty nihilism. His book titles alone give a good flavor of his approach: Steal This Book, Fuck the System, and Revolution for the Hell of It. "Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist," he wrote in his autobiography. He mastered the art of calling anybody he disliked or opposed a "fascist," dubbing Ronald Reagan "the fascist gun in the West." Hoffman, another member of the Chicago Seven, was a fugitive from justice for most of the 1970s, eluding charges that he was a cocaine dealer.
His antics were less an echo of the Nazis — a generally humorless bunch — and more an updating of the Italian Futurists, the artistic auxiliary to Italian Fascism.45 The Futurists were actors, poets, writers, and other artists determined to bring all of the qualities of youth and revolution into the streets and cafes of Italy. Their fascism was theatrically violent, glorying in shock and disruption. The Futurists embraced the rush of speed and technology, the yippies glorified the rush of drugs. But it was really the same shtick. Hoffman and Rubin, for example, proposed a "Theater of Disruption" during the Chicago convention that would blend "pot and politics into a political grass-leaves movement." Updating Sorel's doctrines of myth and violence — no doubt without credit — Hoffman set out to create a "vast myth" of bloodshed and shock. "We will burn Chicago to the ground!" "We will fuck on the beaches!" "We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!" It may sound funny now, but the intent was to force a confrontation that would spill blood in the streets. In August a yippie underground newspaper, Seed, announced it had withdrawn its request for a permit for a youth rock festival. The editorial explained, "Chicago may host a Festival of Blood...Don't come to Chicago if you expect a five-day Festival of Life, music and love."46
For those willing to look past a lot of meaningless rhetoric about Marxism, the fascist nature of all this was glaringly obvious. Indeed, one could simply take countless radicals at their word when they said they were "beyond ideology" and all about action. One of the most obvious giveaways was the New Left's obsession with the "street." The radicals talked incessantly about "taking it to the streets," of the need for "street theater," street protest, street activism, even "dancing in the street," as the song went. Many of the best books during and about the period use "street" in their titles, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, Jim Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets, and Milton Viorst's Fire in the Streets being just a few examples.
Fascists were always fixated with the street. Horst Wessel, the martyred street fighter, captured the spirit of the street in the poem that became the Nazi anthem: "Clear the streets for the brown battalions...Soon will fly Hitler-flags over every street." The Futurists considered the street the only authentic stage. "The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents," declared F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement. The Futurists, according to Marinetti's famous phrase, glorified "the beautiful ideas which kill." "For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism," wrote Benedetto Croce in 1924, "in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all tradition, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism."47
That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as "redemptive" and "transformative." Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. "For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial," he explained. "They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty."48
Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in order to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by "bringing the war home." (One of Rudd's comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to "turn New York into Saigon."49) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra "First Brown, then Red."
Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence — even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd's fondness for expletives — helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When "moderates" at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the "defense committee" at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, "You fucking liberals don't understand what the scene's about. It's about power and disruption. The more blood the better." At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 1965, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."50 Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton's mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: "Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit."51