Revolution Volume I: The 1960s Counter Culture & Rise of The New Left

Source:Amazon- Roger Kimball's book.

Source:The Daily Press

“In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change “cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals,” he intersperses his argument with incisive… 

From Amazon 

“I’m into the study of revolutions, not the coopting of revolutionary rhetoric to sell capitalist merch. I’ve cut together clips of 1960s radicals discussing the politics of their time to give young people a sense of the intense revolutionary fervor of that era. Americans today have been presented with a flattened out, cliche image of 60s radicalism and have lost any sense of just how tumultuous that period was. This is what America looks like when it’s actually working. I’ll be tracing the history of revolutionary and countercultural movements in America from the 60s to the 90s in an ongoing series of youtube clips. (I added on the Church of the SubGenius at the end but that comes much later.)”   

Source:Roger Dolittle- Dr. Martin L. King speaking at the 1963 March On Washington. Perhaps the best speech ever given in American history.

From Roger Dolittle

I believe the best way to look at the New-Left political movement and Students For a Democratic Society, which is definitely part of that movement, is to look at the Irish nationalist movement in Northern Ireland, Britain and it’s relationship with the Irish Republican Army. Or the Palestinian nationalist movement in Palestine and its relationship with Palestine and Israel. SDS aren’t Nationalists, but they were the military wing of their political movement. 

Source:Students For a Democratic Society- protesting the Vietnam War.

Radicalism is not new to America, we were founded thanks to a revolution, a revolutionary war with the United Kingdom. And I believe every generation at least in the 20th Century is different with different values from the previous generation, at least when they’re young and then perhaps moderate and become part of mainstream society as they get older and become more experienced. So it’s not radicalism that’s new to America, but perhaps each generation as their own culture revolutionary movements.

I think what’s different from the 1960s with young Baby Boomers and perhaps Silent Generation babies that were perhaps seen as the mentors and role models of the Baby Boomer Hippies and radicals, is socialism and communism and the beliefs that those things aren’t actually wrong and bad and that the Cold War, especially in Vietnam and America’s involvement there was wrong.

I believe what the young radicals in America believed was that the people who were wrong, were the American establishment which was made of Conservatives and Progressives who were seen as trying to push American liberal democracy and capitalism onto the rest of the world, especially in the third world like in Asia and Latin America.

What these young folks believed that the people who were wrong were the people who were running America and they wanted a change. And even a revolutionary change in America as far as how it was governed. And decided to speak out and organize and even use violent means to accomplish their political goals.