The Marginality of the American Left: The Legacy of the 1960

Abstract

The mistakes of the left are only one reason for its decline: the left has also been undermined by the rising power of global corporate capital and discouraged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent victory of capitalism over socialism. But this article will focus on what the American left has contributed to its own marginalization because while the left cannot reverse these trends, it can rethink its own perspective. In the sixties, the left was intertwined with a set of social movements. In the nineties, the left has come to be an intellectual milieu, a climate of opinion, with no coherent, collective relationship to movements for social change. What holds this milieu together is a common memory of or identification with the radicalism of the sixties. Many of the ideas that the left has drawn from the sixties do not fit the conditions of the nineties very well. Gradual dissociation from social movements and increasing immersion in academia over the last thirty years has also led large sections of the left to revise the legacy of the sixties in ways that isolate the left and divert it from issues of social change.