> That was one of the great discoveries of the 1960s New Left.
> For all their faults, one positive achievement of the New Left
> was their realization that it was
> the liberals who were the main enemy, and that liberals
> were more dangerous than the rightwingers because
> of their capacity for cloaking military aggression abroad
> and repression at home under a veneer of progressive
> sounding rhetoric.
======================
Wishful thinking, and deluded to boot. What exactly has happened to the New
Left, and its "one great discovery and positive achievement"? The great
majority of those who were part of the 60s student revolt now identify
themselves as liberals and view the rightwing Bush administration rather
than the Democratic party as the "main enemy" in both foreign and domestic
affairs.
Actually, they have always been essentially liberal, which has not precluded them - in the name of liberalism - from rejecting the bipartisan imperialist foreign policy of the DP leadership and the cynical humanitarian rhetoric used to justify it. They marched against the Johnson administration during the Vietnam war, and they're equally opposed today to the Democratic leadership's thinly-disguised support of the war in Iraq.
But it's a mistake to extrapolate from this and conclude that US liberals ever regarded the Democrats as "more dangerous" than the Goldwater and Nixon Republicans in the 60s or then the Bush Republicans now. This wishful delusion is what underlies a lot of the sectarianism which still characterizes that small part of the New Left intelligensia which did break decisively with liberalism and the DP and assumed the rest of its student generation was dutifully falling in behind it.
It is, if anything, even more naive today to beleive in the durability of this "great discovery" than it was in the 60s when Marxists could at least credibly draw on the dynamism of mass socialist movements and societies to counter liberal illusions about capitalism.Today, the only mass alternatives to liberalism are on the right, and no one active in or supportive of contemporary social movements is buying that the mass liberal and social democratic parties, in this changed historical context, represent the greatest danger.