Irving Howe on the 'New Left'

Irving Howe was of the American anti-Stalinist 'Old Left'. In 1966 he listed the main characteristics - negative, as he saw them - of the 'New Left':

1. An extreme sometimes unwarranted, hostility toward liberalism.


2. An impatience with the problems that concerned an older generation of radicals.


3. A vicarious indulgence in violence, often merely theoretic and thereby all the more irresponsible.


4. An unconsidered enmity toward something vaguely called the Establishment.


5. An equally unreflective belief in ‘the decline of the West’.


6. A crude, unqualified anti-Americanism, drawing from every possible source, even if one contradicts another: the aristocratic bias of Eliot and Ortega, Communist propaganda, the speculations of Tocqueville, the resentment of post-war Europe, etc.


7. An increasing identification with that sector of the ‘third world’ in which ‘radical’ nationalism and Communist authoritarianism merge.

[Irving Howe, ‘New Styles in “Leftism”’ in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), pp. 291-2]

This was a harsh but not unreasonable charge-sheet.