Tom Hayden, An Appreciation

Summary: We lost one of a generation of passionate activists last night. Tom Hayden entered into eternity at the age of 76. For those of us who were old enough to remember Tom in real time, he was that paradoxical figure; the insufferable bombthrower and the principled voice of conscience. With Tom’s death, we bid farewell to another of the great personages of a time we shall not see again. As the 60s fade out of living memory, to be replaced by sepia-toned nostalgia and treacly Hollywood biopics, there is something almost elegiac in the news of Tom Hayden’s passing.

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Tom Hayden died last night. He was 76 years old and he had suffered a serious stroke roughly a year and a half ago. His death appears to be from complications thereof. As I look out at the overcast sky today I feel a profoundly elegiac mood, as if something unrecoverable had slipped into eternity, and I’m reminded of a haiku from Bashō:

All along this road
not a single soul – only
autumn evening comes.

A decade ago, we all observed with regret how the so-called Greatest Generation, the men and women who made possible our victory in World War II, had been slipping into eternity at the rate of something approaching 1100 per day. In 2009, we bade farewell to Harry Patch, the last living British veteran of The Great War. Now, we must gird ourselves for a new tranche of departures.

Tom’s death was not exactly unexpected. Eighteen months is a fairly long time to survive after a serious stroke. It gave him, and to some extent, us, time to prepare, for in the words of the Great Litany, we all seek deliverance from “dying suddenly and unprepared.”

And so Tom’s death should be an occasion for us of the mourning that comes naturally on such an occasion; but it should also be a time of remembrance and a time for drawing lessons from a life filled with occasion and consequence.

I don’t propose to recapitulate here the details of Tom Hayden’s biography. That work has been done, and done more ably than I could do, by journalists and obit writers. My purpose is appreciation. My political life and Tom’s both occurred within the large, often fractious, circuit of the Californian Left.

To be a Democrat in California was to confront, and even to embrace, Will Rogers’ timeless paradox: “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” To be a Democrat in California during the latter years of the 20th century meant walking a fine line between what was politically pragmatic and doable and pursuing quixotic and frankly unattainable causes because it was the ideologically pure thing to do.

As the late Coachella Valley queer and democratic activist George Zander used to note, any political party, but particularly the Democratic Party, is made up of an unstable coalition of what George used to call “movement people” and “campaign people.” “Movement people,” or as they sometimes like to call themselves “transformational” people, tend to see politics as an enterprise for the ideologically pure. Such people tend to see themselves as more idealistic, and are more prone to see their politics in binary, black and white, frames.S

“Campaign people,” by contrast tend to be scorned by movement people as excessively “transactional.” Transactional campaign people tend to ask questions like: what is an election calculus for a particular race? How many swing voters do we need to bring into our camp? What will it cost to mount a successful campaign for a given constituency?

Movement people and campaign people are often separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The movement people tend to be ideologically pure; the campaign people tend to ask, pragmatically, “what works?” To apply an analogy from the history of the People’s Republic of China, movement people tend to be more Maoist in their approach, while campaign people tend to gravitate toward the more pragmatic teachings of Deng Xiaoping, who was reputed to have said “Socialism is what works.” Where movement people have often been willing to sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect, campaign people have tended to be guided more by the philosophy of Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei G. Gorshkov, whose favorite motto, apropos of procurement, was “‘good enough’ is best.”

I make no bones about being a campaign person. I’m interested in transformation, but I’m also interested in what we need to do to accomplish the transformation. I saw something similar from Tom Hayden during the years he served in the California Legislature. It would have been easy for Tom to take an uncompromising, bomb throwing, “transformational,” mindset into the Capitol building in Sacramento, and to become a prima donna among the Democratic caucus.

But, the Legislature is not a place for prima donnas. Any Assemblymember is just one of 80, and any Senator is one of 40. In order to get things done in the Assembly, you have to be able to count to 41, as it were, or, in the Other House, to 21. If you can’t muster a majority, you cannot function effectively as a legislator. Yet Tom managed to function effectively in the Legislature, in both the Assembly and in the Other House.

In short, the bomb throwing, Judge Julius Hoffman-baiting transformational activist was able to make perhaps the most important political transformation there is, transitioning from a movement person to a campaign person.

In a very real sense, that is the core of democracy. Our public institutions of self-government cannot function if they are staffed exclusively by “transformational,” movement people. Indeed, much of the long-term success of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s altogether promising campaign for the Presidency of the United States – and, conversely, much of the failure of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for President–- can be accounted for by the difference between movement people and campaign people.

The Sanders campaign was always about movement people. It billed itself as being a transformational campaign, a “political revolution,” and it attracted movement people to it. In that regard, it has been somewhat like the snakebit campaign of Donald Trump, which has tried to appeal to so-called movement conservatives, albeit with limited success. Hillary, on the other hand, has been careful, methodical, and in many ways classically feminine in her campaigning. The Clinton campaign has been nothing if not careful and exquisitely transactional.

Indeed, the success of the Clinton campaign has mirrored, to a large degree, the success of the Obama campaign of 2008. Barack managed, in 2008, to balance and reconcile the demands of both movement people and campaign people, to be brilliantly transformational while also pulling off a coldly transactional defeat of John McCain.

Tom Hayden managed to balance transformational ardor and transactional pragmatism. His early embrace of Bernie Sanders reflected, I think, his own early transformational proclivities; while his later coming round to Hillary Clinton reflected a transactional view of what was attainable in our politics in 2016. That may be a skill set we are in danger of losing.

The great ones, the old ones, are slipping into eternity. With each obituary we read, we are reminded that those exciting times are passing out of living memory. In 1938, with war looming, Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of the city of Tokyo, wrote a haiku that is almost untranslatable, but renders approximately as

Falling snow
And Meiji is far away.

Looking out into the pluvial October weather, in a world incrementally impoverished because it no longer has Tom Hayden in it, I think

Falling rain
And Woodstock is far away.

It is to be regretted the Tom Hayden did not survive long enough to witness what the tea leaves now suggest is the well-nigh unstoppable momentum of of Hillary Clinton to the White House. Like Moses, he was allowed to reach the mountaintop, but not to go into the promised land. We can do his memory no greater service than to elect that “nasty woman” President of the United States in 15 days’ time.

May his memory be a blessing; requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.