"A Consuming Obsession with Sin"

"Given the right’s religious base, it’s not all that surprising that conservatives focus on moral transgressions—whether they violate God's divine law, America’s founding ideals of liberty, '50s-style norms of sexual behavior and good housekeeping, or other codes of conduct. But the left can be prudish and judgmental about the evils it holds in special contempt, too. On college campuses in particular, activists often take an almost religious approach to politics, rooted in a belief—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—in the irredeemable sin of America and its mainstream. Their work on vital issues gets diverted from real-world objectives and takes on the character of a church revival, with rituals to express its believers' sin and salvation, and a fundamentalist attention to language and doctrine.
"The late American philosopher Richard Rorty famously argued in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that this inward-looking dogmatism and zealotry was a major problem for the left. To a self-destructive degree, activists rejected dissent and criticism of their hallowed principles. They alienated the uninitiated with their join-us-or-else self-righteousness, undermining public support for the important causes they cared about. They turned away with disdain from any whiff of political power, elitism, or national pride, thus depriving themselves of some of the tools they needed to bring about tangible changes to policy."

Victor Tan Chen at The Atlantic criticizes "the cultural left."

Agenda Setter for a Generation

"In jail, he began working on what later became the Port Huron Statement in 1962, a manifesto that inspired the national student movement to fight against what it saw as an oppressive government.

"'Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them,' Hayden wrote in the statement. It was a philosophy he would later adopt himself in his numerous successful and unsuccessful runs for office."

Evan Sernoffsky and Steve Rubenstein at SF Gate write an obituary for Tom Hayden.

"A Repudiation of the Politics of the Age of Obama"

"Zinn was deeply influenced by anarchists, and this anti-statism kept him from doing what most of the left has been doing of late—identifying with the holders of state power. Some of Zinn’s friends, Duberman writes, resented his 'never speaking well of any politician.' When many considered John F. Kennedy to be a champion of black civil rights, Zinn declared that the president had done only enough for the movement 'to keep his image from collapsing in the eyes of twenty million Negroes.' Going farther, Zinn argued that African Americans should eschew involvement with any state power, and even counseled against a campaign for voting rights.'When Negroes vote, they will achieve as much power as the rest of us have—which is very little.' Instead, they should create 'centers of power' outside government agencies from which to pressure authorities."

Thaddeus Russell in Reason reviews Martin Duberman's Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.

"He Stole the Show with the Finest Piece of Oratory Ever to Emerge from the White New Left"

"He was all-American, Midwestern, and original: 'We have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.' Was Soviet Communist not a rotten system? Of course. But 'my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.'"

Todd Gitlin in The New Republic eulogizes Carl Oglesby.

"The Archangel of Student Revolt"

"Freedom's Orator leads us, then, into a historical paradox: the radicalism of the FSM--its disruption of campus decorum through sit-ins and the like, its assertion of students as citizens rather than charges of the university--rested on a liberal foundation that much of the FSM's rhetoric insistently undermined. From one perspective, the FSM was reanimating liberal ideals of participatory democracy--the freedoms of speech and association, exercised with consequence--that established liberals seemed to ignore in practice; it offered a true believer's liberalism. From another, it was joining with the Goldwater campaign to delegitimate postwar liberalism, rallying like the Goldwaterites against state-sponsored bureaucracy and helping to popularize the phrase 'well-meaning liberal' as a term of disrepute."

Scott Saul reviews Robert Cohen's Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s in The Nation.

The Person Spoke

"Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him 'the best teacher I ever had,' and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund."

Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard in The Boston Globe report the sudden death of Howard Zinn in Santa Monica.

Race or Counterculture?

"The key moment in the History Channel's '1968 with Tom Brokaw' comes when Brokaw interviews my onetime colleague, the historian Alan Brinkley. Brokaw prompts Brinkley, 'The left went too far, excessive in its behavior on a daily basis?' Brinkley replies, obligingly, 'Well, there were excesses on the left, needless to say--' and then: Wham! Down comes the editor's digital X-Acto knife. We don't hear the end of that sentence, nor do we hear any real historical analysis in the rest of Brokaw's two-hour film, whose secret subtitle is 'How Hippies Ruined America.'"

In The New Republic, Eric Rauchway disputes Tom Brokaw's account of the impact of the 1960s on the Democratic Party.