Editor’s Note: This is the seventh installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, and the sixth here.

The roots of the current cultural and political crises, in part, began with the emergence of the anti-American left.

What began as a largely idealistic effort to create an alternative to capitalism rapidly degenerated into an assault on American values and the American system. When the existing system did not implement the bold — often radical — changes demanded by the reformers, their idealized intellectual analysis rapidly devolved into extreme demands and actions. (READ MORE: Poland’s Opposition Readies Kangaroo Courts)

An interesting intellectual exercise mutated into a hostile, sometimes violent opposition to the American system. In effect, the new radicals declared if the change they wanted didn’t come voluntarily they would force it.  That evolution toward complete opposition and violence started slowly and accelerated throughout the 1960s.

The emergence of this anti-American left is important because it has been evolving and growing for over 60 years. The so-called alumni who participated as young activists in the 1960s gradually became networkers and mentors for later generations of leftist activists.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are direct products of these networks of long-time radical leftists. This is especially true for Obama. His meteoric rise from a neighborhood activist to a state senator to a United States Senator and finally to President could not have happened in such an astonishingly short time without the network of leftists who began nurturing him in high school and college.

Mills: Students, Not Unions, Make Up the ‘New Left’

The intellectual start of the campus-oriented radical movement took root in the fall of 1960 when leading sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote “A Letter to the New Left.” in the New Left Review’s September-October issue. 

Mills argued that the old model of seeking radical change through the working class and the union movement was dead. Furthermore, he saw the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and the market capitalism of the United States as equally unacceptable paths to a better future. His concept of a “New Left” drew inspiration from similar anti-Soviet, anti-capitalist movements around the world — in fact, the first use of the term seems to have come from France (Nouvelle Gauche).

The New Left was a movement seeking a path to socialism that would radically change the existing society — without the totalitarian system Vladimir Lenin had developed and Joseph Stalin had further entrenched in the Soviet Union. (READ MORE: Joe Pesci, Sinéad O’Connor, and the Lousy Liberal Media)

Mills’s big insight was that everywhere in the world students and academics were the leading agents of change. This was a profound shift from the focus on the working class that Karl Marx had believed. Students, not unions, would be the vanguard of the anti-capitalist revolution. 

Ironically, this shift toward making students on college campuses the vanguard of radical change was strongly supported by the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther. Reuther had been radicalized by the bitter fight with the Ford Motor Company in the 1930s. He was supportive of every effort to change America, which he saw as wholly controlled by big business and the wealthy.

The decisive moment came on June 15, 1962, when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) adopted what came to be known as the Port Huron statement at their first national convention. The title came from the meeting held at the Port Huron, Michigan training center for the United Auto Workers. 

Young Americans Turn Socialist

SDS evolved from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (the youth division of the League for Industrial Democracy). Its roots extended back to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which had been founded in 1905 by several soon-to-be prestigious intellectuals (including novelists Upton Sinclair and Jack London, and attorney Clarence Darrow). Branches studying and advocating socialism sprang up on campuses such as Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Wesleyan, Barnard, and New York University.

Indeed, socialism was a growing political force before World War I. In 1904, socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs got 400,000 votes. Milwaukee elected a socialist mayor. At its peak in 1918, there were more than 1,200 socialists elected to various local offices across the country. By the 1912 presidential election, Debs received 901,551 total votes, 6 percent of the popular vote. Then in 1920, Debs ran, this time while serving time in jail for opposing World War I. He received 913,693 votes.

However, socialism as a political alternative (which had achieved major party status in many European countries) collapsed in America after 1920 due to four major factors.

The dictatorships Lenin and Stalin imposed on Russia made socialism a lot less attractive. There was a level of coercion and brutality in the Soviet system which discredited the left in general and put its members on the defensive.

There was also a deep split between those leftists who became communists and those who remained socialists. The ideological civil war undermined the appeal and the momentum of socialism in America. (READ MORE: Ask Amy’s Bridezilla and Mother Are Just One Example of Leftist Intolerance)

Additionally, there was the absolute failure of the Woodrow Wilson administration to run things effectively. When the government ham-fistedly took over the railroads in December 1917, and the telephone system in July 1918, the American people got a real sense of the bureaucracy’s inability to run large complex, technologically advanced institutions. In a sense, the aggressiveness of Wilson’s progressive commitment to big government vaccinated the American people against government controls and socialism.

Finally, the 1920s were a time of remarkable technological and economic change. So many new things were being invented, and mass production was bringing costs down dramatically. Simply put, it seemed that capitalism was working much better than socialism. The American boom contrasted vividly with the sense of malaise and stagnation in Europe.

When the depression ended the boom, the country shifted toward government reform — but not government takeover. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was cautious about getting too far ahead of public opinion. With a few exceptions (the Tennessee Valley Authority for example) he sought reform and regulatory steps rather than government ownership and socialist solutions.

The New Left sought to define itself as separate from communism and socialism because it knew both terms would limit its appeal. Students for a Democratic Society would be far more acceptable than Students for a Socialist Society. Of course, the ultimate goals were amazingly similar. 

SDS, to a remarkable degree, followed the strategy laid out in Mills’ initial article. Their Port Huron statement focused on recruiting academic centers because “Universities have a permanent position of social influence.” They went on to assert that they are “the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.” SDS set out to “involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty.” 

Their goal was to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy.” They had an explicit intention to work with outside groups and bring “major public issues into the curriculum” while they could “make debate and controversy. In their view this focus of the academic world would “build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.”

Six decades later, the hard left dominates 90 percent of our college campuses. The power of strategy — implemented over time by dedicated people — can change the trajectory of history.

While SDS was developing the Port Huron statement — before the Vietnam war became the overarching event for their generation — the fear of nuclear war and the danger that civilization could end was a real part of their sense of urgency. As they said in the Port Huron statement: “We may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” 

Some of the intensity of the emerging energized youth movement came from the transition from President Dwight Eisenhower to President John F. Kennedy. Eisenhower had run a successful, safe, largely calm, and increasingly prosperous America. The soft, pleasant sitcoms of the era helped define a sense of conformity and passivity — I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Andy Griffith Show, etc. It was a nice, easy, unthreatening world — and it felt conformist and boring.

President Kennedy caught the sense of change in his inaugural address in 1961:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Those were stirring words of idealism and of change. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans internalized them and then acted them out in the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, and the anti-war movement. 

The news media collaborated with the Kennedys to create the sense that Camelot had come to Washington. That romantic aura was tragically shattered on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas. The new emerging television capabilities meant that virtually every American could be absorbed into personally experiencing the anguish of those days. I can still remember canceling everything I was doing and sitting mesmerized as Walter Cronkite carried us through each traumatic event. We watched the shooting and the race to the hospital. We were there for the announcement that this young handsome charismatic president was dead. We saw his widow wear the blood-stained suit during the swearing-in of Vice President Lyndon Johnson and when she got off Air Force One back in Washington. We were tuned in for the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald (who had spent time in the Soviet Union) and his killing by Jack Ruby inside the Dallas Police Department Headquarters. It was as though the world had gone mad. Eisenhower’s calm had turned into this nightmare in three short years.

Because of President Johnson’s style, he was unable to reach and convince younger Americans. The media, which had adored Kennedy, despised Johnson. Then, only eight and a half months after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson convinced Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution committing the United States to a war with North Vietnam. It was a war he would not fight to win and could not convincingly explain to the American people.

At each stage of this tragedy, thousands of young Americans found themselves increasingly alienated from the establishments and principles that had governed America for the previous generation. 

One pattern that illustrates the increasing alienation in American culture in the 1960s is in movies.

Social Change in Film

In 1953, Audrey Hepburn made her starring debut in Roman Holiday (she won an Academy Award). She is a delightful pleasant naïve princess who fell in love with Gregory Peck — but realized she had to do her duty as a princess and so turns her back on Peck and Rome. She upholds the conventions of her world despite all the temptation to bolt.

Eight years later, in 1961, we saw a different Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Now she is a woman who dates men who pay her (not a prostitute but a geisha, as author Truman Capote makes clear). She falls in love with a man upstairs who has been earning money to focus on his writing by allowing a wealthy woman to keep him. The rules are now being flouted. To set the stage for scorning President Johnson, Hepburn is a refugee from a common law marriage in Texas and refuses to go back when her husband tracks her down. Suddenly responsibilities, duties, and societal rules matter less than personal desires and self-fulfillment.

By 1967, rebellion was even clearer when Dustin Hoffman as The Graduate sleeps with his girlfriend’s mother, races off to rescue his girlfriend from a horrible, imposed marriage, and traps the wedding party in the church by using a cross to lock the doors. (The symbolism was a little heavy if you ask me). I first saw The Graduate as a graduate student at Tulane in a showing on campus. It was enthralling.

The key moment of alienation comes when Hoffman is at a party to celebrate his graduation from college. He asks a wise, wealthy older man the secret to a successful life. “Plastics” is the answer. Faced with a life of meaningless deals, the rest of the movie is legitimized by the shock of plastics as the most for which he can hope.

In many ways, The Graduate has its roots in Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. (It was made the next year into a movie with Gregory Peck.) It is the story of a successful rising young businessman who realizes that dedicating his life to business for purely financial gain is an inadequate and ultimately deadening prospect. He quits his high-salaried but all-consuming career to spend more time focused on his family. He has rejected the dull establishment for a life with meaning.

By 1969, we have the motorcycle film Easy Rider, chronicling the trip of two outcasts seeking to spend the profits from a cocaine deal. This astonishing independent film cost $400,000 and grossed $60 million. It clearly hit a nerve about drugs, hippies, communes, sexual liberation, and the tension between locals and bikers. It is the classic film of alienation and a nation deeply split between a counterculture and the traditional establishment. The film leaves you totally sympathetic to the outcasts and hostile to the brutal defenders of traditionalism.

I mention these films because the stream of political anti-Americanism was being carried by a river of alienation and desperation. Yes, Hollywood played a significant role in producing films that undermined traditional America. But Hollywood did not buy $60 million worth of tickets for “Easy Rider.” In many ways, Hollywood was responding to more than it was shaping the evolving culture.

The Gap Between the System and Students Grows Wider

The political parallel to the counterculture films was the rise of the Free Speech Movement, first at Berkeley and then across the country. 

On Oct. 1, 1964, a graduate student was arrested for trying to raise money to help the Civil Rights Movement. Berkeley had a rule that only the two major political parties could have activities. Several thousand students surrounded the police car and commenced a 32-hour standoff.

Tensions continued to build until December when several thousand students gathered at Sproul Plaza to protest the university administration. In a speech that would reverberate among students and radicals across the country, student leader Mario Savio said: 

“… But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! …  There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The spirit of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the nihilism of plastic from The Graduate were born in a demand that the establishment grant freedom of speech and assembly — and in some cases of decision-making — to the students.

The Berkeley demonstrations were the first large non-racial civil rights demonstrations. They indicated that the spirit of rebellion had spread beyond the black community to the larger student population. As the anti-war movement grew and absorbed the Free Speech Movement, the numbers began to expand dramatically. By May 22, 1965, more than 10,000 joined an anti-war march at Berkeley.

By the fall of 1965, the Berkeley protests had become such a big issue in California that it began to affect the governor’s race. Ronald Reagan was running against incumbent Gov. Pat Brown (when actors were not considered serious enough to run a government). To prove he was capable, Reagan hired the leading Republican consulting firm, Spencer and Roberts. They prepared a big shoe box of 4-by-6-inch cards with a different issue on each card, and, as a professional actor, Reagan memorized them easily and could handle virtually any question. However, the consultants had not prepared a card on student activism at Berkeley and when Reagan went to his first question-and-answer session, he was almost immediately asked what he would do about the protests. He gave a tough law and order answer, and the audience was happy. When Reagan asked his consultants about the issue, they said not to worry because it wasn’t really an issue. The same thing happened at the second voter meeting. Reagan then told the supposed professionals that if the voters thought the protests were an issue they were an issue.

Gov. Brown’s failure to deal with Berkeley — and Reagan’s commitment to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” — were significant factors in Reagan’s 57 to 42 percent victory (an almost 1 million vote margin). Berkeley ultimately helped make Reagan a national political figure.

Even with the Reagan gubernatorial administration cracking down on the violent student activists, events continued to grow out of control. By May 1969, a new crisis arose over the fight to build a “People’s Park” at Berkeley. The university administration wanted to develop the area, and a large number of student activists wanted to keep it as an open space for people to use. More than 6,000 students mobilized to block the university. Gov. Reagan sent in 2,700 National Guard. Within a week, more than 800 students had been arrested. It was during this period that Gov. Reagan, in a speech to a business group, said “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” The alienation between leftist activists and the system could hardly have grown wider.

Then it did.

By the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the American left was in chaos over the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the Kennedy assassination, and various protest movements. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had barred SDS and other protest groups from the convention floor in the International Amphitheatre on the grounds that they were anti-patriotic. The convention grounds were surrounded by barbed wire and the police presence was enormous. Naturally, violence broke out. The level of brutality exercised against the protestors served to motivate the left — and create sympathy for the protest movement from the media. By the end of the convention, television stations had shifted focus completely to “The Battle of Michigan Avenue,” which had broken out outside.   

The failure of the SDS to seriously impact the war or fully reshape the Democrat Party — even with the mass turnout and chaos at the Democratic National Convention — led the more activist and intense members of the SDS to opt for a more aggressive strategy.

At the SDS national convention in June 1969, there was a clear split between the radical and traditional (albeit still leftwing) factions. The radical wing produced the paper “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” from which came the term “Weathermen.”

The radicals were calling for a secret movement dedicated to revolutionary violence. As their founding document put it:

The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is different from the traditional revisionist mass base of “sympathizers.” Rather it is akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.

Two of the key signers were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn — who would later mentor, support, and befriend the young Obama as he made his way through Chicago politics. The intimacy of their relationship with Obam, combined with his long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and 16-year attendance at Trinity United Church of Christ, indicate an affiliation with anti-American radicalism that will reemerge in future articles.

In July, 30 members of the SDS leadership went to Cuba to meet with the Castro dictatorship and the North Vietnamese, who openly hoped they would open up a second front in the United States to help drive the Americans out of Vietnam. 

In the midst of all this, on Aug. 9, 1969, the Charles Manson cult killed seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate who was expecting a child at the time. While Manson was not directly involved in the political left, his drug use, communal lifestyle, and development of a cult that considered murder acceptable was seen by most Americans as one more example of society breaking apart and losing cohesion and predictability.

From the Weathermen standpoint, Manson was heroic. He understood the corruption of the system and the revolutionary act of random killings creating terror. Doran’s cell adopted a four-finger salute symbolizing the fork with which Tate was stabbed.

For those who wonder how the concept of white privilege entered the political process, consider that the Weathermen considered all white babies to be “tainted with the original sin of ‘skin privilege.’” In the Weathermen view, “all white babies are pigs.” Acts of violence against white children was justice.

As a sign of their clear anti-American position, the Weathermen ultimately issued a declaration of war against the United States government. 

The winding down of the Vietnam War took most of the energy and support out of the Weathermen movement. However, during its heyday in 1971 and 1972, it and its allies set off 2,500 bombings in the United States. That is almost five a day. 

While SDS (which at its peak as a political movement had nearly 100,000 student members) and the Weathermen disappeared as the Vietnam War became less a factor in American life, the commitment to radicalism, the rejection of the traditional systems, the intensity of opposition, the focus on radicalizing schools, and the willingness to break the rules were driven deep into the culture of the American left. They would reappear repeatedly over the next 50 years. 

While the radical left was mobilizing on the outside President Lyndon Johnson was busy crippling America on the inside with a monstrosity called the Great Society.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.