New Left As Right: Convergent Themes of Political Discontent

Abstract

Boundaries between the New Left and the traditionalist and libertarian factions of the conventional Right are today often obscured by newly emerging issues. This study attempts to clarify some of the new meanings applied to Left and Right, based on comparative survey data from thirdparty activists of the Los Angeles Peace and Freedom County Council and major party activists of the Los Angeles Democrat and Republican County Central Committees, and on participant observation and content analysis of statements presented by representative spokesmen of the New Left and conventional Right. Three basic points of growing convergence between the two political camps are: (a) a joint attack on the increasingly centralized and bureaucratized structure of authority in government and society; (b) a growing existential theme of personal worth, human dignity, and social justice; and (c) the offering of localized and personalized solutions.

Freedom and Equality: Two Values of Political Orientation

“…Lynd has been cited as being a member of the New Left (30, 31) and this investigation confirms the importance of Freedom as an ideological theme of the New Left movement as cited elsewhere but in different phraseology (see 2, 4, 9,11,12,14,30,31). Other studies (1, 6, 14) suggest that some members of the Old Left and Communist Party of that era might be more representative of the Communist pole than the later ideologists and would possibly, therefore, fall more distinctly within Rokeach's theoretical framework.…”

Social mobility, status attainment, and class formation: Theoretical, ideological, and methodological problems in international comparative research

“…Many people especially in the lower strata are resigned to their entrenched class positions, while others overtly reject and actively campaign against these goals, as witnessed in the 1960s and early 1970s by the significant numbers of discontented and politicized youth across the industrialized Western world who had opted out of the established structure of values and authority. Special hostility among the youth counterculture during that period was directed precisely at those values that lay stress on the mobility goals of material or financial success, status achievement, and social prestige (Schweitzer and Elden, 1971). …”