Departments

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New Left

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    2/7/2022

    Todd Gitlin's Work Against the Dark

    by Jeffrey C. Isaac

    As an activist and later a chronicler of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin shaped the path and the legacy of the New Left. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    11/4/2021

    Radical Movements and Political Power: Terence Renaud on New Lefts

    by Justin H. Vassallo

    Terence Renaud's history places the international New Left movements that emerged in the 1960s, and today's left activism, in the context of radical traditions that have sought to avoid hierarchy and rigidity. Questions remain about how ideals and ethics can combine with organizing to change institutions.

  • 4/18/2021

    Don't Erase Women's Leadership in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

    by Robert Cohen

    Historians have yet to fully examine the role of women in leadership and at the grass roots of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Even some of the best and most insightful accounts of the FSM treat it as a movement of men and ignore the key roles of Jackie Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker and others. 

  • 7/19/2020

    The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Black Action Movement and the Way Forward

    by Martin Halpern

    Activists in today’s struggles against institutionalized racism and for black lives can benefit from studying a local victory of fifty years ago. In the spring of 1970, the Black Action Movement (BAM) at the University of Michigan led a thirteen-day strike that won a commitment to change by the university administration.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/13/2020

    These Young Socialists Think They Have Courage. They Don’t.

    by Mitchell Abidor

    If Mr. Trump is re-elected, many DSA members could spend the next four years suffering little more than the pangs of political outrage. But millions of less fortunate people would suffer real consequences.

  • SOURCE: Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
    1-27-15 (accessed)

    What New Left History Gave Us

    The New Left historians’ withering critiques of liberalism have proven enormously influential. But do they hold up in our more conservative age?

  • SOURCE: Crisis Papers
    3-23-13

    Bernard Weiner: Where's "The Revolution"?

    Bernard Weiner, a poet, playwright, photographer and Ph.D. in government & international relations, is co-founder and co-editor of The Crisis Papers website (www.crisispapers.org). For two decades, he was a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle. To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .So here we are in the Spring of 2013, nearly five months after Barack Obama's re-election and the Senate added new liberal members, and not much has changed. And it doesn't look like anything major will change.

  • SOURCE: PJ Media
    3-7-13

    Ron Radosh: When the New Left Shilled for North Korea

    Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute....When North Korea was still being led by its original founder, Kim Il-Sung, the visitors from the United States to the horrendous Communist regime were not the likes of Dennis Rodman. Today, the founder’s grandson has inherited the mantle of leadership, thereby carrying on the dynasty that rules in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as modified by the founder’s philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, autonomy and independence.How far the North Korean Communists have fallen. Back in the day of the old fellow-travelers’ tours to the various communist paradises, the regimes had their praises sung by the likes of the African-American baritone Paul Robeson, who regularly went to the USSR and told the world how great Comrade Stalin was and how the Soviet Union had the only real democracy on earth . At least Robeson was an All-American football quarterback, Phi Beta Kappa, and the most well-known black American actor and singer in the 1930s and 40s, who got a law degree as well at Columbia University. That a man so intelligent could function as a dupe for Stalin was far more worrisome than seeing Rodman do the same today. No one would call Rodman intelligent. He is both a useful idiot as well as a real one; Robeson only filled the first category.