Rothbard’s political essay interprets the emerging American New Left as a renewal of libertarian resistance to centralized power. Through participatory democracy, civil rights, antiwar activism, and education, he identifies possibilities for cooperation across ideological divisions. His enthusiasm for grassroots movements accompanies an effort to redirect their developing commitments toward market libertarianism.
Within the past year, all the news media--not only the little magazines and journals of opinion, but even the mass magazines and radio-and-television, have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of the New Left.
Behind this visibility, Rothbard sees a historical transfer of opposition to the establishment. He portrays the Old Left’s accommodation to the welfare-warfare state as a consequence of its longstanding reliance on governmental power, rather than simply a betrayal of earlier radicalism. Its Cold War commitments reveal continuity beneath apparent political reversal:
For the strident reactionaries and celebrants of the "American dream" of the 1950's and 60's are taking a position logically implied in their supposedly radical golden age of the 1930's.
The contemporary Right likewise forfeits its libertarian claims through support for militarism, imperialism, and police brutality. Against both camps, Rothbard presents participatory democracy as a demand for individual control over decisions affecting one’s life. The essay emphasizes the gap between electoral authorization and substantive self-direction:
The United States is a democracy, all right, but a manipulative one in which we are excluded by and large from the major decisions in our lives.
For Rothbard, participation means more than collective voting. Consensus and voluntary involvement in particular projects offer ways to organize without oligarchy or compulsory party discipline. Although prolonged deliberation can be exhausting, these experiments suggest possibilities for voluntary cooperation. Direct action extends this principle into public struggle: participants enact their convictions rather than delegating change to professional representatives. Civil disobedience challenges the reverence for law shared by conservatives and social democrats, while civil rights resistance demonstrates the potential effectiveness of committed minorities.
The constructive counterpart is the creation of parallel institutions outside established governmental structures. Drawing on Staughton Lynd, Rothbard connects this strategy with American revolutionary committees and Russian soviets. Community unions, Freedom Schools, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union supply contemporary examples. His discussions of police brutality, segregation laws, urban renewal, federal antipoverty programs, and discriminatory unions distinguish liberation undertaken by oppressed people from reforms administered over them.
The peace movement supplies a further test of this distinction. Rothbard criticizes older organizations for pursuing respectability, concentrating narrowly on nuclear danger, and avoiding a fundamental confrontation with American imperialism. He credits SDS and the May 2nd Movement with connecting opposition to the Vietnam War to the structures producing it. Teach-ins can create alternative scholarly communities, but lose force when experts become aspiring government advisers. Immediate withdrawal, he argues, supplies a morally definite objective that procedural demands for negotiation lack.
Education concentrates the conflict between autonomous activity and bureaucratic management. Through Clark Kerr’s conception of the university and the arguments of Berkeley activists, Rothbard depicts mass higher education as preparation for service to the military-industrial complex. Student resistance challenges standardized production, administrative paternalism, and fragmented learning. Paul Goodman’s educational anarchism and emerging Free Universities suggest alternatives organized around intellectual independence and a community of scholars.
The conclusion makes explicit the ideological stakes of these experiments:
But the New Left is not nearly as devoid of ideology as many observers believe.
Rothbard nevertheless finds unresolved contradictions, particularly in Lynd’s combination of decentralization with centralized economic planning. Drawing on John McDermott, Goodman, and Bruno Rizzi, he distinguishes voluntary market coordination from corporate privilege and state monopoly. His proposed destination—a free market in a free society—is his interpretation of participatory radicalism’s implications, not an established New Left consensus. The essay’s central intervention presents grassroots self-government and market libertarianism as potential allies against centralized domination.
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