“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.
“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19th, 1863.
In just over two minutes amidst one of the darkest periods of American history, Abraham Lincoln succinctly outlined the guiding principles of modern democracy. Many have struggled to reach this utopian vision of government and it is a struggle that was to be repeated a century after Lincoln’s address by an emerging intellectual movement that put all people at the centre of their political framework—a movement that came to be labeled the New Left. Radical 1960s political idealism is often characterised by the New Left, but Van Gosse has argued that it is ineffective to view the trajectory of the New Left movement within the explicit confines of the 1960s but “acknowledge that the New Left began earlier and lasted longer than a focus on the Kennedy and Johnson years will permit”. In order to broadly understand New Left radicalism of the 1960s an examination of each individual movement is necessary, as Gosse argues, “in terms of its own inner development, which a best reproduces the enormously diverse and plural character of the New Left”. Gosse’s argument for a methodology for understanding the New Left certainly carries weight; however, a comprehensive historiographical analysis of the multi-faceted nature of the New Left is beyond the scope of this essay. This essay will focus primarily on the politicisation of college students within the New Left and their shift in strategy and rhetoric. The New Left movement, although rooted in intellectual origins (among other factors to be discussed) that suggested young college students were the new revolutionary class to overthrow capitalism, at the beginning of the 1960s did not appear overtly revolutionary, but rather reformist from a community focused perspective. However, because of the movement's rejection of a hierarchical political methodology, its quixotic aims, and failure to gain widespread popularity outside the student populous, combined with the intensification of opposition to the Vietnam War, the momentum of Civil Rights movement, and the failure of the Federal Government to respond to criticism (aside from violent suppression), the New Left movement took on a more revolutionary disposition. The growing membership of various New Left movements could not be systematically organised without a rigorous and coordinated structure, and as a consequence the movement split into factions—each with its own tactics and ends without any popular support.
The guise of the New Left in the United States in the wake of World War II and the McCarthyism of the 1950s served to offer a neo-Marxist critique of American society. This was in contrast to methodology and rhetoric of Old Left criticism, which believed that the working class was the primary impetus for socialist revolutionary change. Academics of the Old Left had succumbed or acquiesced to American liberalism; their effectiveness reduced by the storm of anti-communist purges of the Red Scare. Amidst the height of Cold War tensions younger radicals were averse to the centralisation, authoritarianism, and bureaucracy of Soviet socialism. Irwin Unger has argued that the conformity and banality of 1950s America—in contrast to the economic upheavals and war of previous decades—was a recipe for an estranged youth. Although post-war "American society produced material abundance, it also produced alienation, especially among its youth".
