While Mamet titled his piece "Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal," Stoppard opted for the less-inflammatory and somewhat more illustrative heading, "1968: The Year of the Posturing Rebel." And, it is important to note that, in Stoppard's case, he was not renouncing an ideology he had once fully embraced, but rather reaffirming an opposition to it that he had always held. Stoppard remembers that he was "embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent." He continues:
It is, of course, rather fitting that Isaiah Berlin shared similar sentiments on the matter, given that he has been such an inspiration for Stoppard's work (most notably, Berlin's writings on the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century provided much of the basis for the philosophical dimensions of The Coast of Utopia). As told by Michael Ignatieff in his biography of Berlin, regarding a lecture that the great historian of ideas gave in New York City in 1968 (when else?), "he saw the 1960s revolution as an uprising against the boredom, security, and lack of existential challenge in the post-war capitalist boom. He thought the anger was about psychological malaise, hypocrisy...alienation...class consciousness...and not oppression of the majority by a wicked or deluded minority."What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.
This shrewd observation--that the left-wing rebels of the '68er generation were searching desperately for a grand cause based on which they could unite, and against which they could protest, but that would require a vast distortion of the truth, namely, that the inequalities in American society during those years were akin to the totalitarian oppressions that had brought Europe to its knees before and during the second World War--was a central argument, too, in Paul Berman's book Power and the Idealists. He remarked there that:
Again, it is remarkable to note the similarities between Berlin and Berman, and unfortunate that the latter seems not to have acknowledged the former in any of his writings. But the common theme here--the criticism of the radical uprisings of the 1960s all over the Western world--is a fascinating one, not least because of the intellectual journey that many have taken since then, as evinced my Mamet, Berman, and many others, who have looked back at that time, aghast at what they witnessed and what, in some cases, they took part in. It is the story of youthful idealism, transformed by the passage of time and a more mature sense of perspective about the very real freedoms that we are blessed with in this part of the world, and how they can be so easily forgotten, or taken for granted, or harshly criticized, all under the shadow of an imagined state of bondage.The New Left was a young people's movement motivated by fear...It was a fear that, at least in the Western countries, social progress rested on a lie, a fear that prosperity was theft, and Western wealth was Third World exploitation, a fear that Western civilization comprised a system of manipulation designed to mislead its own people and everyone else...It was a fear, in sum, that in World War II, fascism, and more specifically Nazism, had not been defeated after all--a fear that Nazism, by mutating, had continued to thrive into the nineteen-fifties and sixties and onward, always in new disguises...And so, the New Left in its youthful anxiety found its way to an old and mostly expired panic from its parents' generation, and bent over it, and fanned the dead embers, and breathed on them, and watched aghast as the dying flames leapt up anew...And with a disguised Nazism apparently in command at home and across the Western world circa 1968, the need for an extremely radical resistance seemed to cry out from every stone.
