This report was originally published in The Atlantis News Vol. II, No. 10, March 16, 1969, pp. 3-4.
by Roy Halliday
New York, NY -- Approximately 75 people attended the third Libertarian Forum dinner held at the Jaeger House restaurant. Guest speaker Leonard Liggio's topic was "The New Left: A Libertarian Response."
Professor Liggio used a historical approach to his topic. According to his analysis, for the past two centuries liberty has been the goal of the Left and not of the Right. The Left consists of those who want to change the existing order of society, and the Right consists of those who want to maintain it. Unfortunately, the Left (except for the libertarians) chose the inappropriate means of authoritarianism, dogmatism, bureaucracy, and socialism to change things and, of course, failed to achieve liberty or justice. In America, the Left has become a Fabian coalition with the marines. The marines, however, along with the local police, are the heroes of the Right. Since the means of the Left were essentially the same as the Right (statism), the Left was coopted into working with the established order and became less radical. Libertarians were about the only ones not included in the great counter-revolutionary fusion.
The Cuban revolution encouraged many of the young idealists on the Left. C. Wright Mills was among the first to see its significance. He wanted to radicalize the Old Left and make a new one from it. He was joined by the people who worked on Studies on the Left, which began in 1959, and by William Appelman Williams who also was opposed to what he called "America’s imperialist system."
Another contributing factor in the birth of the radical, nondogmatic New Left was the opposition to "the Bomb" led by Bertrand Russell.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was an important force in the early 1960s when it became a rallying point for those who were impatient with the peaceful approach to solving racial inequities. This set the stage for Malcolm X who preached revolutionary black nationalism, as opposed to compulsory integration, and added another source of radicalism to the growing New Left movement.
In 1962, the SDS issued their famous Port Huron Statement which, though not truly radical, was much more appealing to many young people than ADA-type liberalism.
In 1964 came what Liggio considers to have been the turning point: "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi. The outcome was that many of the young people involved came to regard the Establishment, for the first time, as criminals.
With the escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 came a corresponding escalation of the protest at home. SDS took in many new members who had no previous Old Left experience. The SDS-led march on Washington in April 1865 was opposed by the Old Left because the marchers totally condemned America’s role in the war.
The implications of Liggio’s review of recent history are that the New Left is distinct from the Social Democrats and Fabians of the Old Left; that the New Left people have become more and more radical; that they have grown significantly in number; that they include a wide variety of people, but especially the young and the idealistic; that they are generally opposed to imperialism, racism, bureaucracy, and the corporate state; and that they are more interested in action than ideology.
Because the New Left lacks ideology, it is not consistently against the state. Most of them are only situationally against the state and could be coopted back into the establishment like the Old Left. Another basic flaw in the New Left is that the great majority of their scholars and theoreticians are Old Guard types who will try to bring them back into the mainstream. If this is to be prevented, the New Left must be presented with a consistent anti-state ideology, which can only be provided by the libertarians.
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