Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.

Memoirs and historical monographs by New Left historians painted a virginal portrait of radical protesters, rewriting the history of the period on a scale that would have seemed impossible outside the Communist bloc. In his own memoir, Hayden includes pages of excerpts from his FBI file, interspersed with disingenuous presentations of his political career that keep his readers in the dark about many of the far-from-innocent activities in which he actual1y engaged.

In 1971, when still a radical, I wrote a widely-read article in Ramparts attacking the Weather Underground for its terrorist ideas and practices.

It was what I believed to be the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now.

Republicans lost control of the narrative because they never held the Democrats accountable for their betrayal.

The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.4 Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

My responsibility as a “revolutionary” was to hurt the United States.

Like most of the left’s leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.