Pollak: Joan Didion’s Warnings About the Emptiness of the Left Still Resonate

Few would describe Joan Didion as a conservative.

The writer, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 87 in New York from complications of Parkinson’s disease, was at times the doyenne of the liberal literary establishment.

But in her essays about her native California, notably “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Didion offered warnings about the emptiness of the left-wing counterculture emerging with the hippie movement and the New Left radicals — warnings that still resonate today.

“Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” which appears in a collection of the same name, was Didion’s exploration of the Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, when “flower power” drew hitchhiking teenagers from across the nation who had rebelled against the prosperous conformity of postwar America.

In their revolution, however, Didion observed that the hippie generation lacked any sense of what they were really fighting against; they simply reflected America’s own self-doubt right back at it.

Several of her essays in the book explore the meaningless of much of what passed for enlightened liberal opinion. She gently mocked folk singer Joan Baez, who launched something called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, a gathering of a handful of utopian activists who discussed what books they were reading, made up ballet dances to Beatles songs, and talked about how to change the world. She was similarly skeptical of a more formal think tank, called the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, whose scholarly members took themselves so seriously that they recorded all of their conversations.

She took a more sympathetic, if somewhat pitying, view of a radical communist in the black neighborhood of Watts, in Los Angeles, who pounded the table and spent much of his energy dissecting his disputes with rival Marxist organizations.

But it was in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” that Didion went beyond criticism to deep, immersive, almost anthropological journalism, creating a window onto a time and place that are now romanticized by our popular culture, but which were, at the time, also deeply sad.

Didion talked to the angry rebels handing out cryptic political pamphlets calling for mass riots; asked runaways why they had left home; observed as her new acquaintances dropped acid together on quiet afternoons.

One chilling passage described a troupe of radical actors, all white, accosting a black man in the Panhandle park on a Sunday afternoon at a Janis Joplin concert, demanding that he express outrage at white people for appropriating rock ‘n’ roll.

The actors, wearing blackface, begin to jab him with police nightsticks, urging him to echo their outrage against the country.

“Nobody stole Chuck Berry’s music, man,” another black man protests. “Chuck Berry’s music belongs to everybody.”

“What’d America ever do for you?” a female activist retorts (original emphasis).

Fast-forward to 2020, and that same “woke” arrogance appeared regularly at the Black Lives Matter “protests,” with white Antifa rioters taunting black police officers.

At one point, Didion observed that much of the mainstream media had failed to understand the hippie phenomenon; they reported it, she said, as if it were “an extended panty raid,” or as if it had some deep and meaningful political message.

The press missed the story, she said, even during the period “when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another” (a bad tendency that, if anything, has only become worse).

Here was Didion’s own analysis of what the Sixties were really all about:

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. 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 … They feed back exactly what is given them … their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

Today, we are just waking up to the fact that these children — the “woke” and their protégés — have already taken control. They are no longer outcasts: they are tenured professors and social media managers and executive producers and diversity consultants and White House officials.

Didion saw it coming, and she tried to warn us. We didn’t listen, but we can still learn.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.