Remembering Bayard Rustin

In TNR, Jamie Kirchick remembers an old anti-totalitarian leftist who died twenty years ago:

[Bayard] Rustin had once dallied with communism but later became a stanch opponent of Soviet totalitarianism, and he worked throughout the 1960s and 1970s to ensure that the civil rights movement and the liberal coalition itself were not associated with communist fellow traveling, opposition to Israel, and unilateral disarmament. He was a key figure in the anti-communist Social Democrats USA (a faction of Eugene Debs's old Socialist Party), from which Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialists split in 1973 over the Vietnam war. In March of 1967, Rustin explained that while he was not a supporter of increasing American military involvement in Vietnam, "Nor can I go along with those who favor immediate U.S. withdrawal, or who absolve Hanoi and the Vietcong from all guilt. A military takeover by those forces would impose a totalitarian regime on South Vietnam and there is no doubt in my mind that the regime would wipe out independent democratic elements in the country."

Another way of phrasing this would be to say that Rustin was a Sidney Hook liberal. And in answer to your next question:

Much as these organizations were the intellectual stomping grounds for neoconservatives, Rustin could not be labeled as such, despite what his detractors, then and now, have said. Unlike the neoconservatives, who renounced the New Deal, Rustin never faltered in his social democratic convictions, supporting all aspects of the welfare state from national health insurance to massive increases in federal spending for education, housing and job creation. While his anti-totalitarian convictions led him to abandon the Democratic Party, Rustin was never a supporter of Ronald Reagan, nor did he ever affiliate with the GOP. Biographer Daniel Levine writes that, as early as 1972, Rustin was "distressed by the capture of the [Democratic] party by people he considered politically suicidal." Not for nothing did he title his chapter on Rustin in the 1970s, "No Place Left to Stand."