Voice of the Old New Left

Ramparts first made its mark in the mid-Sixties, with a widely publicized exposé of CIA infiltration of student groups. I still don’t understand all the fuss, but fuss there was, and Ramparts was made. Since then its contempt for regimes that infiltrate student groups has been exceeded only by its affection for regimes that monopolize them. Nonetheless, it is a little more liberal than it used to be.

Month after month, Ramparts produces some of the liveliest covers and deadliest prose around. Most of its articles are muckraking, of the sort crammed with arcane statistics and anecdotes of allegedly typical alleged atrocities (Greece and Chile, you know). There are also lots of pieces by New Left oldtimers like I. F. Stone, Andrew Kopkind, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Kurt Vonnegut (if you can call him a New Leftist—well, there he is). Chomsky, for instance, recently called Richard Nixon one of the greatest criminals of the century, and it had nothing to do with Watergate: war crimes, and so forth. He said that Watergate, though the least of Nixon’s sins, would be his downfall only because it had offended other powerful U.S. interests.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ramparts first made its mark in the mid-Sixties, with a widely publicized exposé of CIA infiltration of student groups. I still don’t understand all the fuss, but fuss there was, and Ramparts was made. Since then its contempt for regimes that infiltrate student groups has been exceeded only by its affection for regimes that monopolize them. Nonetheless, it is a little more liberal than it used to be.

Month after month, Ramparts produces some of the liveliest covers and deadliest prose around. Most of its articles are muckraking, of the sort crammed with arcane statistics and anecdotes of allegedly typical alleged atrocities (Greece and Chile, you know). There are also lots of pieces by New Left oldtimers like I. F. Stone, Andrew Kopkind, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Kurt Vonnegut (if you can call him a New Leftist—well, there he is). Chomsky, for instance, recently called Richard Nixon one of the greatest criminals of the century, and it had nothing to do with Watergate: war crimes, and so forth. He said that Watergate, though the least of Nixon’s sins, would be his downfall only because it had offended other powerful U.S. interests.