Agonized-Statism
Anarcho-Statism
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Posts: 3,816
Political Matrix
E: -9.10, S: -5.83
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« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2022, 04:58:10 AM » |
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The New Left that started in Port Huron and Berkeley fell victim to the lack of discipline that they believed, somewhat rightfully, made the Old Left live long enough to become the villain (part of "the man"). The SDS began to split under the strain of internal dissension after the old statement in Port Huron was abandoned for a new call for action in 1967. This infighting was fomented to varying degrees by COINTELPRO, particularly in the case of the Black Panther Party, whose membership peaked in 1970: retaliatory assassinations between the Newton and Cleaver factions caused hundreds of members to leave in 1971. The violence that many groups turned to as protests were shut down by authorities without achieving their goals and subordinated minorities with more to lose took center stage from the student movement, though exaggerated or misconstrued in some cases by the mainstream press, also turned quite a few off. Few of those who remained died in revolutionary violence: some likely found themselves increasingly tied up with lumpenproletariat in the crime world to fund their operations, dying instead in street violence or from frying their brains on drugs.
As the organizations splintered and the radicals died off (literally), the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned the New Left ended with Vietnam, the start of desegregation, and the end of post-war economic expansion that permitted its attacks on pragmatism to begin with. Much of the countercultural style had been integrated into mainstream American society by the early 1970s: the diminished prominence of liberal hawks with a relative reduction of Cold War tensions and Vietnam syndrome made the Democrats appear friendlier than they had. A lot of leftists became liberals at varying speeds much as the Old Left revisionists had, being tugged even further right into the 1990s with the Third Way. Some students- Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, Bayard Rustin- even became neocon Republicans.
Some turned inward and found spiritualism, joining up with the New Age movement (a few of them with Jim Jones). Some deluded themselves into thinking they could retire from politics entirely, becoming eccentric entrepreneurs and businessmen like Jerry Rubin. A few technologically-inclined leftist boomers may have been among those in the information technology industry to turn instead to a disengaged hopeful technological determinism, the Californian Ideology.
Some are still involved in third parties, like Gloria La Riva.
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