How We Can Win

The decade of the Sixties is widely regarded in retrospect as the heyday of the New Left. This summer twenty years after the riots that enlivened the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968, veterans of those heady days—greying now, with traces of middle-aged spread —are gathering here and there to relive what they plainly consider the Good Old Days, and to tell respectful interviewers how they “changed America.”

Hardly anybody pauses to reflect on the striking fact that the New Left’s heyday coincided precisely with the development of the Republican Party’s so-called “lock” on presidential elections. Since the glory days of New Left activism, there have been five presidential elections. The Republican Party has won four of them, three by landslides, and lost the fifth by the narrowest of margins (50.1 to 48.0 per cent) for very special reasons. That there might be a connection between these events is rarely discussed in the media, for that would suggest that the New Left “changed America” in ways that its masterminds can hardly have intended.

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William A. Rusher

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Presidential Election

The decade of the Sixties is widely regarded in retrospect as the heyday of the New Left. This summer twenty years after the riots that enlivened the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968, veterans of those heady days—greying now, with traces of middle-aged spread —are gathering here and there to relive what they plainly consider the Good Old Days, and to tell respectful interviewers how they “changed America.”

Hardly anybody pauses to reflect on the striking fact that the New Left’s heyday coincided precisely with the development of the Republican Party’s so-called “lock” on presidential elections. Since the glory days of New Left activism, there have been five presidential elections. The Republican Party has won four of them, three by landslides, and lost the fifth by the narrowest of margins (50.1 to 48.0 per cent) for very special reasons. That there might be a connection between these events is rarely discussed in the media, for that would suggest that the New Left “changed America” in ways that its masterminds can hardly have intended.