We Didn’t Know It Would Be So Hard: the Short, Sad, Instructive History of the US New Left

Abstract

Of all the western countries in which something like a new left appeared during the 1960s, probably that in the United States exhibited the most stunted sense of historical continuity with earlier movements both in the US and abroad (Caute, 1988; McDermott, 1997). Part of the reason was cultural, rooted in the romantic American illusion of having escaped from history into a realm of pure voluntarism. But the virtual disappearance in the preceding decade of a viable Communist old left did deprive the New Left of a generation of elders who might have passed along some muchneeded political wisdom and historico-internationalist perspective. But by the beginning of the 1960s, the CP/USA had become a moribund dogmatic sect, its once-extensive praxis destroyed by government repression during what has been called the McCarthy era (Schrecker, 1983, 1993, 1998). New leftists saw little to admire in what was left of American communism, ideologically tethered to its increasingly unattractive Stalinist political orientation. The Port Huron Statement, the New Left’s major early ideological manifesto flatly stated that ‘we are in basic opposition to the communist system’ (Miller, 1987, p. 350; cf. Weinstein, 1970, Ch. 7). For their part the Communists contemptuously dismissed the new leftists as troublesome anarchists, while the independent Marxists around Monthly Review magazine ignored them (Green, 1971; Miller, 1987, p. 162).