Reconstructing the Experiment: Politics, Ideology, and the American New Left

Abstract

The explosion has subsided. But nostalgia for sixties has only grown in face of Reagan victory, rise of Right, cohesive assault on liberal fortress by neo-conservatives, economic decline, and rollback of welfare state. Unfortunately, this nostalgia has tended to interfere with a critical re-evaluation of the in which most of contemporary generation of American leftists came of age. Despite emotional attachment to past, new social forces which have emerged, and real successes which have been achieved, owl of Minerva does only spread her wings at dusk. Yet, as past exposes contradictions which continue to haunt present, new possibilities arise as well. If these new opportunities are to be seized, revolutionary politics of future cannot simply be divorced from past. By same token, it has become impossible to remain content with verities. Thus, a new critical perspective becomes necessary to reconstruct past from anticipatory standpoint of a revolutionary future. The politics of sixties cannot be derived from splits which movement underwent or from doctrinal disputes of Maoist and Trotskyist sects which once loomed large on political horizon and which are now forgotten. If there is any organization which can give a sense of political Zeitgeist, it is alternative to old left around which new movement coalesced: Students for a Democratic Society. It doesn't matter that formal organization was smaller than it is generally believed to have been. For this political grouping seemed to crystallize a new set of sentiments on American scene. Indeed, arising out of civil rights movement and League for Industrial Democracy it was SDS which incarnated most radical and utopian value of New Left: participatory democracy. Repulsed by bureaucratic monster that had arisen in Soviet Union, disgusted by elitism and complacency of Social Democratic movements, and appalled by hypocrisy of liberal establishment and its reformism, SDS sought to activate masses.