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Entry: Remembering Kent State: The President as Street Thug Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/kent_state_the_president_as_street_thug#1441 Post contents: Granted that the Vietnam war was badly mismanaged; that Nixon was a bad president, and far from a conservative; that in the Kent State shootings and other street violence of the period, constituted authority was largely if not wholly to blame. How does this make the "New Left... largely right"? And how could it have experienced an "eclipse by the Marxist element" when it was ab initio a creature of heterodox (i.e., not Soviet-inspired) Marxism? Does anyone remember who Herbert Marcuse was? In the 'sixties and 'seventies he was well known as the guru or godfather of the New Left. Marcuse was a Frankfurt school Marxist. The Frankfurt school understood that just tearing down the private-property economy could not provide an adequate basis on which to rebuild a collectivist society. The foundation of Western civilization (and just about any other civilization), namely the patriarchal family, had to be destroyed before a new Marxist society could be built upon its ruins. Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization" was seminal to the New Left, and to much of the change in our social order we have experienced since the 'sixties. "Women's liberation" and "gay liberation" owe their birth directly to Marcuse. His concept of "repressive tolerance" underlies the present phenomenon of "political correctness." The leadership of the New Left was drawn not from the baby boom generation, but from a slightly older group who were grad students and junior faculty members at the time the boomers were undergraduates. Many of these people were "red diaper babies" like Abbie Hoffman and the now-neoconservative David Horowitz. They took the theory learnt from Marcuse and put it into practice. There never was a complete separation between the New and the Old Left. For example, the nomination of McGovern in 1972, the result of the New Left's takeover of the Democratic party, placed on its ticket a man who in 1948 had supported not Truman, but Henry Wallace. Though the New Left was not directed from the Kremlin in the way that much of the Old Left had been, it still substantially served Moscow's interests. If there was any prominent figure in the New Left who was not a Marxist of some sort, I should like to know who that was. Sent at: 2008 10 07