Radical Chic 52 Years Later

Yesteryear’s radical chic morphed into today’s wokeness and virtue signaling.

Fifty-two years ago New York Magazine published “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” by Tom Wolfe. With his outstanding satirical talent and observational skills, Wolfe described the bizarre scene at a cocktail party at a 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, the home of Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, the famous symphony conductor.

It was a fundraising event to raise money for the defense of 21 Black Panthers who were arrested on a charge of conspiring to blow up five New York department stores, New Haven Railroad facilities, a police station, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. In attendance were 90 people, including the upper-crust of high society, celebrities, and a few media personalities, including Barbara Walters, the famous journalist of the time. Black Panthers were honored guests.

Radical chic was the ultimate in progressive hypocrisy, naiveté, foolishness, and self-immolation. It predated the term “limousine liberal,” which in turn predated today’s wokeness and virtue signaling. As with its later incarnations, radical chic did little if anything to solve root problems in African-American communities or society in general.

Wolfe’s essay was as long as a novella, about 25 pages. It can be found in its entirety here. If you don’t have the time or interest in reading it, this commentary gives the highlights and relates them to today’s fatuous displays of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory.

The photos that accompany the essay are priceless. Rich, pampered, bejeweled white elites with perfectly coiffed hair and wearing haute couture can be seen posing and mingling with the Panthers.

Wolfe described the Panthers as wearing “tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall—but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .”

His description of the party’s hors d’oeuvres is delicious:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq hardi, all of which are at this moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . .

Recognizing that it would be a faux pas for the Panthers to be served by blacks, the Bernsteins had retained white Latins as servers (and servants).

Speaking about the contradictions between the Upper East Side denizens and the Panthers, Wolfe wrote, “It is like the delicious shudder you get when you try to force the prongs of two horseshoe magnets together . . . them and us . . .”

One of the lawyers for the Panther 21 spoke to the attendees about the injustices of the justice system, including the bail system, which had placed “a preposterous” bail of $100,000 on each of the 21, “which has in effect denied them the right to bail.”

Clamor for bail reform continues today and has been implemented in some jurisdictions. Some say it has resulted in an increase in crime.

As with the killing of George Floyd, the killing of a black man in 1969 had precipitated calls for police reform. The man was Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was fatally shot in a pre-dawn raid at his apartment by the Chicago Police Department.

However, there weren’t calls for defunding the police back then, as there were after the killing of George Floyd, probably because Hampton’s death wasn’t captured on video.

Speaking of defunding the police, present-day students at Columbia University, across town from the locale of the Bernstein cocktail party, had called for cutbacks in campus police after the Floyd tragedy. Due to a subsequent rise in crime at the university, students are now demanding an increased police presence.

At the time of Wolfe’s essay in 1970, the opposite of defunding the police had occurred. Law and order had become the mantra, driven in part by the infamous 1969 shootout between cops and Black Panthers in L.A., a shootout that resulted in the militarization of the police, according to some historians. That shootout had followed a shootout between cops and Panthers in Oakland, as well as the Panthers targeting cops for execution. There were also shootouts between rival black revolutionary groups.

And so the political pendulum has gone, swinging as wildly and dangerously as the pendulum in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Many present-day politicians who called for defunding the police in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement had called for beefing up the police earlier in their careers. Joe Biden was one of them.

In a precursor to the teaching of critical race theory in schools today—a theory that says that whites and their institutions are inherently racist—the Panthers had opened Liberation Schools. While the schools taught students traditional courses in English, math, and science, their primary mission was to instill revolutionary consciousness by focusing on issues of class and institutional racism.

Anyway, back to the cocktail party.

A Panther leader named Cox addressed the attendees, explaining why the Panthers resort to violence: “As our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, says, ‘Any unarmed people are slaves or are slaves in the real meaning of the word’ . . . We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world.”

At the same time, the Panther said that the group believes in Maoism. Wolfe didn’t remark on the contradiction of calling the U.S. oppressive but embracing an oppressive ideology that killed tens of millions of people. This is similar to today’s neo-Marxists who believe that the U.S. is an evil, oppressive empire, as if it would be the epitome of equality, social justice, and racial harmony if they ran things.

The Panther went on to say that there wasn’t anyone in the room who wouldn’t defend themselves and their family if someone broke into their house in the middle of the night to murder them. To which Wolfe wrote what must’ve gone through the minds of the white women in attendance:

. . . and every woman in the room thinks of her husband . . . with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas . . . ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing.

According to Wolfe, one Park Avenue matron was thrown into Radical Chic confusion by calls from the speaker for burning down buildings and other violence. She said, “He’s a magnificent man, but suppose some simple-minded schmucks take all that business about burning down buildings seriously?”

The Panther named Cox continued with a thinly-veiled anti-Semitic reference by mentioning that “the merchants in the black community who are the exploiters of the black community” should be giving donations. To which Wolfe wrote his reaction:

For God’s sake, Cox, don’t open that can of worms. Even in this bunch of upholstered skulls there are people who can figure out just who those merchants are, what group, and just how they are asked for donations, and we’ve been free of that little issue all evening, man—don’t bring out that ball-breaker.

Later in his essay, Wolfe wrote the following about the Panthers’ view of Jews:

The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:

Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon
Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,
Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread
Their filthy women tricked our men into bed
So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .
In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side
Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified

One of the attendees, Otto Preminger, the famous Austro-Hungarian-born movie director, began disagreeing with the Panther speaker on his claim that the U.S. was oppressive. “You said zis is de most repressive country in de world. I don’t beleef zat . . . Do you mean dat zis government is more repressive zan de government of Nigeria?”

Lenny Bernstein then questioned the speaker on his threat that if white businessmen don’t give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from them and placed in the community, with the people. They had this exchange:

Lenny says: “How? I dig it! But How?

“You can’t blueprint the future,” says Cox [the Panther].

“You mean you’re just going to wing it?” says Lenny.

“Like . . . this is what we want, man,” says Cox, we want the same thing as you, we want peace. We want to come home at night and be with the family . . . and turn on the TV . . . and smoke a little weed . . . you know? . . . and get a little high . . . you dig? . . . and we’d like to get into that bag, like anybody else. But we can’t do that . . . see . . . because if they send in the pigs to rip us off and brutalize our families, then we have to fight.”

The journalist Barbara Walters later jumps in:

“I’m talking as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists, and I am, too, and I want to know if you are to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go?

Cox says, “. . . a lot of young white people are beginning to understand about oppression. They’re part of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s a different class from the black community, but there’s a common oppressor. They’re protesting about individual freedoms, to have their music and smoke weed and have sex. These are individual freedoms but they are beginning to understand.”

One of the Panther wives then says to Walters, “You sound like you’re afraid.” “

“I’m not afraid of you,” Barbara Walters says to her, “but maybe I am about the idea of the death of my children.”

Wolfe would go on to skewer the nouveau riche for their nostalgie de la boue, a nineteenth-century French term that means “nostalgia for the mud.” He explained that new arrivals to the upper class have always had two way of certifying their superiority over the hated middle class. “They can take on the trapping of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”

He continued:

During the 1960s in New York nostalgie de la boue took the form of the vogue of rock music, the twist-frug genre of dances, Pop Art, Camp, the courting of pet primitives such as the Rolling Stones and Jose Torres, and innumerable dress fashions summed up in the recurrent image of the wealthy young man with his turtleneck jersey meeting his muttonchops at mid-jowl, a la the 1962 Sixth Avenue Automat bohemian, bidding good night to the aging doorman dressed in the mode of an 1870 Austrian army colonel.

One can only imagine what he’d write today about not only the upper crust but also the highly paid knowledge workers and techies whose wannabe hipster image can be seen in their scraggly beards, tattoos, and hair that looks like a Medusa Head.

Wolfe explained why the upper-crust had weekend places away from the city: to get away in the summer from the hoi polloi:

When one thinks of being trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit’s and Tiffany’s at dead noon the sandstone sun-broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda shorts bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia—well, anyway, then one truly feels the need to obey at least the minimal rules of New York society. One really does.

According to Wolfe, one rule of nostalgie de la boue is that the “styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives” are good. Conversely, the “middle class, whether black or white, is bad.” To point out the hypocrisy of those who think this way, he spoke of their feigned affection for the Panthers, Latin grape workers, and Native Americans, using terms that would get him cancelled today and won’t be repeated by me. He then pointed out something that often applies today to those who claim solidarity with the disadvantaged but keep their distance from them:

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them as well: they were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan, in places like Delano (the grape workers), Oakland (the Panthers), and Arizona and New Mexico (the Indians). There weren’t likely to become too much . . . underfoot, as it were.

Near the end of his essay, Wolfe quoted an editorial that the New York Times ran after the party. An excerpt:

. . . the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represent the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed throughout the nation yesterday.

Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.

The same could be said about much of today’s wokeness, virtue signaling, and critical race theory, but the New York Times isn’t about to say it.