The New Left
By 
With Aaron Sorkin’s uneven but entertaining The Trial of the Chicago 7 getting multiple Oscar nominations, Louis Menand has a good essay about the New Left and its major figures:
The movement that started in Port Huron and Berkeley soon got sucked into the political maelstrom of the late sixties. In March, 1965, the United States began its immense bombing campaign against North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder. That month, marines landed near Da Nang, the first American combat troops in Vietnam. By 1968, there would be more than half a million American soldiers there. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael introduced the slogan “Black Power” and replaced John Lewis as the chairman of SNCC, which began turning away white volunteers. The Black Panther Party was founded the same year. The women’s movement and, after 1969, the gay-liberation movement, representing subordinated groups that the New Left had given little attention to, occupied center stage. Militancy took over, liberals were driven away, and American politics descended into chaos.
In retrospect, the New Left’s break with the labor movement seems a disastrous, maybe an arrogant, miscalculation. So does its support for the Hanoi regime, which, after it finally united the country, in 1975, turned Vietnam into a totalitarian state. But the New Left never had any political cards to play. It was always a student movement. Today, the left has the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to turn its ideals into policy. There was no such wing in 1962.
Still, the spirit of Port Huron and the F.S.M. was not forgotten. The students involved had experienced a feeling of personal liberation through group solidarity, a largely illusory but genuinely moving sense that the world was turning under their marching feet. That sense—the sense that your words and actions matter, that you matter—is what inspires people to take risks, and gives movements for change their momentum.
As usual with Menand it’s a rich essay, very much worth your attention if you’re interested in the subject.