Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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America's first student left in the thirties spent most of its energies fighting the New Deal. The alternative it had in mind to the economic chaos of the Depression was the law and order of Stalinist Russia. When it became clear by 1940 that Stalin had duped the radicals, or they had duped themselves, the American Left lost credibility with the next generation of students. The radical thirties gave way to the conservative forties and fifties, and the "silent generation" did not life a finger to save the deauthorized elders from the McCarthy persecutions...
...Left of the sixties grew out of an affluent society. Worse than that, it grew out of a stable society. The movement lacked objective economic institutions to attack. The moralistic disapproval of capitalism had carried over from the thirties, but the thrust was no longer socialistic. Socialism is mentioned rarely by the moderate wing of the SDS, and even then only awkwardly. The enemy is the system, not just the capitalist system. The New Left has picked up the alienation of the beat generation and combined it with political activism...
FEUER TENDS to use terms like "radicals," "students," and "activists" indiscriminately. He might easily have distinguished the New Left from the New Politics. The New Left prefers to work outside party politics. It prefers direct action for the sake of a moral principle--strikes, demonstrations, building takeovers. Any kind of long run participation in decision-making bores the radicals. It is more Nietzschean to pit one's will against the system and make it yield. Confrontation politics is not really politics...
...Feuer might also have paid more attention to the flower child strand of student militarism because it bears directly on the problems of "alienation" which provide the rationale of revolt. Many in the New Left see the answer to alienation in the mystical striving for community among comrade-students. Their philosophy of love emphasizes "touching one another." The theme of "touching one another" has somehow gotten mixed up with the ghetto concept of "soul" and the Hollywood concept of "beautiful people." What results is a syrupy emotion alleged to strike beautiful people very intensely during moments of civil disobedience...
Feuer refers to Camus as the philosopher of "alienation" and a generational hero. Feuer does not cover the cult of Che Guevara and Regis DeBray, though one passage recognizes the role of Fidelism in radical student culture. The spirit of Che synthesized all the ingredients of the New Left: an anti-American intellectual who galvanized the masses in one country and suffered glorious martyrdom in another. This vision of the radical's mission to redirect history made a somewhat turgid book called Revolution in the Revolution? a best seller. Feuer lists C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman...