What if we looked at the history of "Radical Chic" not from the POV of a celebrity reporter but from that of the activists he was skewering?That first link goes to a Fox News article about CNN’s Chris Cuomo saying that we should worry more about police violence than violent protesters.The recent month of protest has been characterized by A certain strain of liberal criticism can sound a bit like a certain strain of conservative criticism, eager to root out examples of elite social-justice gestures as out-of-touch, hollow spectacle. “I’ve never met a Panther,” she said. I’d make three points.The first is that one has to recognize that “radical chic,” when used as an epithet, is an implicit attempt to split two things apart—politics and style—that activists actually work hard to bring together.We shouldn’t accept the premise that there is doughty “real” activism on one side and shallow spectacle on the other. Students of history might recall that such alliances have been common in the past; for instance, in the Roman republic of the second century BCE, two patrician brothers, Gaius Gracchus and Tiberius Gracchus, sought to outflank their fellow aristocrats by making an alliance with the plebeians. Or, as once-confident candidate Elizabeth Warren put it, “I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College.” According to Wolfe, “The emotional momentum was building rapidly when Ray ‘Masai’ Hewitt, the Panthers’ Minister of Education and member of the Central Committee, rose to speak.” He observes: “Hewitt was an intense, powerful young man and in no mood to play the diplomacy game. Image courtesy of the Online Archive of California, UCLA Special Collections.So, what lesson can be taken away from the affair for today, when the question of struggle for racial justice and culture’s awkward interface with it are both very public features of debate once again? That is, leftier-than-thou politics became a new sort of one-upsmanship.As Wolfe explained, New York’s socialites “have always paid their dues to ‘the poor,’ via charity, as a way of claiming the nobility inherent in noblesse oblige and of legitimizing their wealth.” Continuing, he added, “In 1965 two new political movements, the anti-war movement and black power, began to gain great backing among culturati in New York.”As for black power, a mutant sprout from the civil rights movement, Wolfe allowed that “one does have a sincere concern for the poor and the underprivileged and an honest outrage against discrimination.” And yet at the same time, “one also has a sincere concern for maintaining a proper East Side lifestyle in New York Society.”And part of that lifestyle-maintenance was espousing the right—which is to say, trendy left—positions on key issues. Feigen’s interruption of Cox to demand info on how to throw his own Panther fundraiser is something like the central symbolic moment in Wolfe’s depiction of elite shallowness: “I won’t be able to stay for everything you have to say,” Feigen exclaims from the back of the room at one point, “but who do you call to give a party?”As Wolfe puts it, “There you had a trend, a fashion, in its moment of naked triumph.”While he is relatively restrained in his depiction of the Panthers, limiting himself to insinuating their anti-Semitism, Wolfe’s rhetorical innovation in “Radical Chic” was that by mocking the shallowness of the glitterati’s support of the Black Panther cause, you could essentially have license to belittle and trivialize Black activism by proxy.If you doubt this is Wolfe’s basic purpose, read the essay that is paired with “Radical Chic” in its book form, “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers.” That text is a deliberately grotesque, witheringly unsympathetic caricature of anti-poverty programs in San Francisco—what Wolfe calls “the poverty scene.” It portrayed them farcically as reducible to emasculated white bureaucrats being alternately duped and bullied by Black thugs.Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, 1967. Few things hold the center of attention the way Wolfe’s essay did. “Come on in!” Then the Antifa members entered, offering vintage Molotov cocktails.Get our conservative analysis delivered right to you. How does the story of “radical chic” look, told not from the imagined insides of the Bernsteins’ party guests’ heads, but from the POV of the political activists involved? This is, after all, a period of great confusion among culturati and liberal intellectuals generally, and one in which a decisive display of conviction and self-confidence can be overwhelming.Of course, Wolfe’s essay was very clearly bringing the full force of his literary talent to bear on making any such persistence more difficult. Yet we can focus on another of Wolfe’s writings, a 7,000-word article appearing in the June 8, 1970 issue of New York magazine, entitled, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” The concept has been described as 'an exercise in double-tracking one's public image: on the one hand, defining oneself… It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital. Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere In fact, if the socialites already in line for Panther parties had gone ahead and given them in clear defiance of the opening round of attacks on the Panthers and the Bernsteins, they might well have struck an extraordinary counterblow in behalf of the Movement. False. Nine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. Someone might want to remind Joe Biden, who’s just picked progressive California senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, that his vice-president-to-be believes Catholics are unfit to serve in our nation’s courts.