By Mike Gray

[The record] shows that neither then [during the ’60s], when it would have counted, nor later, when it would have clarified, did most mainstream liberals offer up anything as direct and definitive as a stern, unqualified denunciation of the New Left, black nationalists, or other activists inspired by them. The more common response was to try to have it both ways, to suggest that the radicals behaved regrettably, at worst, but that the social evils they opposed explained and to some degree justified their conduct. As the years went by, having it both ways meant that this ambivalent response to the radical fringe would be collectively remembered as having been a principled, unyielding one.

— William Voegeli

Liberal-Progressives have had fifty years to apologize for their more radical confreres, but only now are they expressing any regret — much too late. So the anti-capitalist mentality, hatred of the West, cultural and political Marxism, and anti-Semitism continue to grow among the intelligentsia:

. . . . we must go deeper still, to the worldview cultivated in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. In the decidedly non-calloused hands of this largely student, spectacularly arrogant, but largely know-nothing New Left, an already-authoritarian Marxism became completely unmoored from the working class, the West, and democracy and moored instead to ideologies of the noble savage, fantasies of “Third World Revolution” and an irrational belief in the redemptive power of violence. The New Left saw the world in a very peculiar way. A third world “periphery” was pitted against the metropolitan “center” and “good” oppressed nations were at war with “bad” oppressor nations.

“Camp” replaced “class” as the track along which a great deal of left-wing thought would now run . . . . Much of what is said and done by today’s left — including its ‘anti-Zionism’ — is unintelligible without grasping that when ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ displaced ‘class struggle’ as the organizing category of thought and the basis of political identity.”

Read more of Ron Radosh’s Pajamas Media article — “The Enduring Dangerous Legacy of the Sixties New Left” — here.

A book review about the ’60s appeared on TAC here.