An Open Letter from SDS Veterans Haranguing Young Socialists to Back Biden Was a Bad Idea
We don’t need melodramatic hyperbole from New Leftists telling us to campaign for Joe Biden. We need to build a democratic-socialist movement that is the only real hope for the planet’s future.
Protestors at the march against the Vietnam War organized by Students for a Democratic Society and the Women’s Strike For Peace, Washington DC, April 17, 1965.Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
The Nation has published an “open letter from the old new left to the new new left,” signed by more than sixty “founders and veterans of the leading New Left organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society.” Its main thrust is to criticize younger leftists — in particular those in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — for not endorsing Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
If there’s a generation between the “old new left” and the “new new left” — the middle-aged new left, perhaps? — some of its members will remember a similar plea from one of the letter’s signatories, Todd Gitlin, before the 2004 presidential election.
“Restarting Politics”
On the eve of the Republican National Convention that year, Gitlin debated with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now. He urged anti-war protesters to stay off the streets and fall in line behind John Kerry:
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