Category Killers.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Review

A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s, by Rebecca E. Klatch, Berkeley: University of California Press, 386 pages, $22.95

Those who believe in stable, immutable political categories will have a hard time interpreting the career of Cindy Decker (a pseudonym). Decker's mother belonged to the John Birch Society, and Cindy's earliest political views, formed as a teen in the early 1960s, reflected those of the radical right. Another Bircher arranged for Cindy to spend two weeks at the Freedom School, an academy in Colorado Springs run by free market guru Robert LeFevre. There, Birchite skepticism about socialism veered into skepticism about any sort of state, and she found herself taking in lectures espousing anarchism, atheism, and pacifism.

Decker got involved with a fellow she met there, and he drew her into the Minutemen, an anti-communist paramilitary group. At the same time--1964--she started going to the University of Kansas, where she got involved in the civil rights, antiwar, and hippie movements. Increasingly disturbed by the racist element in the Minutemen, she wound up moving to Berkeley and joining the national council of Students for a Democratic Society. There, among socialists, she espoused libertarianism--even as she joined a drive to organize tuna cannery workers.

There must have been something in the Kansas air: Gus diZerega studied there too, and through a series of odd events managed simultaneously to chair the campus chapters of SDS and the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. DiZerega's introduction to non-Euclidean politics came at the YAF chapter's third meeting, when a beautiful young woman--perhaps Decker, though diZerega doesn't identify her--arrived and sat in the back of the room. She turned out to be the secretary of the local SDS, and after the meeting she told diZerega that his group was a bunch of "fascists."

"Fascists believe in big government, she said. "You believe in the draft, don't you?"

"Well, yeah," replied diZerega.

"Doesn't the draft mean big government controlling people?" she asked.

Suddenly on the defensive, diZerega decided, after a little more back and forth, that he should try attacking instead. "Well, you socialists believe in big government," he said.

"I'm not a socialist," she replied. "I'm an anarchist." And that, diZerega reports, was when things started "to get real bent."

Both of the above stories come from A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right...