Abbie Hoffman was a colorful radical who led a group called the Yippies (derived from the name Youth International Party, founded in 1967) along with Jerry Rubin, who eventually left the radical movement of Yippie-dom to become a stockbroker. Abbie wrote a best-selling book titled Revolution for the Hell of It and was known for combining mockery and humor with his revolutionary fervor. On one occasion, he went to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw dollar bills from the visitors’ balcony towards the floor of the Exchange. It was Abbie’s way of mocking the money-focus of the NYSE and of American society.
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Hoffman was a graduate of Brandeis University, where as an undergraduate, he took courses taught by a professorial savant by the name of Prof. Herbert Marcuse. Prof. Marcuse was one of a group of academics known as the Frankfurt School, who had migrated to the USA from Germany to escape the threat of Nazi persecution for their Marxist views. The Nazis also wanted strict government control of the economy, but private ownership of property was still allowed (however, ownership without having the final say over the use or disposal of that property or its attendant finances is at variance with the classic definition of “ownership”).
The Frankfurt School professors who fled Germany were not merely bourgeois, freedom-loving critics of Nazism, but were full-blown communists. In one of his books, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote, “The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counter revolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime.”
These miscreants who undervalued the freedoms and goals of American society were only a small part of the fervent leftist leadership on our campuses during the 1960s and into the 1970s. In the black demographic, Martin Luther King began leading very large demonstrations in the South and throughout the country calling for an end to segregation on buses, schools, public transportation, and in almost all venues of society.
Other leaders in the African-American population believed that King was not aggressive enough in his repudiation of white attitudes and behavior towards black Americans. Leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael emerged with more aggressive challenges to perceived white supremacy and especially to the police in various cities. They asserted that the whites in the USA had put targets on the backs of blacks and that segregation, arrests for crimes, and daily harassment of blacks were the results of a deep-seated hostility towards black citizens.
However, the violence of these individuals and the advocacy groups led to extreme internal disputes and crimes among them and their followers, resulting in murders, incarcerations, shootouts with police, deadly drug overdoses, and expatriation (Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture and left the USA, taking up permanent residence in Africa). Certain lifelong leftist supporters of these groups, such as David Horowitz, began waking up to the evil intentions and false beliefs of these extreme radicals.
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With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the end of the Vietnam War, the disintegration of radical groups because of internal disputes and murders, shootouts with the police, and the lack of a clear-cut cause to instigate against the USA, much of the radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s died out.
But in the late 1980s and early 1990s Bernadine and Bill became friends with an up-and-coming political superstar, Barack Obama (who, as a lifelong chameleon personality, had shifted from his original name of Barry Soetoro). In a 2008 article in Politico, Ben Smith tried to minimize the friendship or political connection between Barack, Bernadine, and Bill, but even he had to, “…the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.”
This background friendship helps us understand that Obama, despite his equivocations about there not being a left nor a right-wing America, became the successful personification of left-wing values in a post-1960s world. As early as 2008, Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute perceived that despite his desire to be seen as centrist, Barack was a man identified with a radical, leftist agenda. Fast forward to 2026 and we find Newsweek Senior Editor Josh Hammer even more emphatic about the left-wing ascendancy that was the presidency of Obama.
Then, as if to engrave this ascendancy into stone, in June of 2020, the Biden camp signed a 110-page pact with Bernie Sanders and the DSA wing of the party emphasizing cooperation and agreement on policies. The Democrat platform which came out a couple of months later contained 90 pages, most of which reflected the policies and provisions of the earlier pact, with non-commitment to universal Medicare being the main difference. This Democrat unity around far-left principles and policies thus was written in stone at that point as the party tried to recover the path to leftist victory that had been captured by and affirmed by Obama from 2008-2016.
Except for two terms of President Clinton, during the 28 years following Pres. Jimmy Carter (1980-2008), the Republicans held the Presidency for 20 years. Obama’s election and re-election and Hillary’s loss to Pres. Trump in 2016 was a signal to the Dems that their best hope for regaining the Presidency was a shift to the left, which Obama had clearly represented. Thus, we see the reasoning behind the Biden camp signing onto an agreement with the Sanders DSA group in 2020.
Obama’s presidency became the catalyst for bringing together the Democratic Socialists with the Democrats. Although Barack was not a Democratic Socialist, his bona fides as a leftist were widely accepted. The Democrat Party believed that a left-wing face on the Party would be a path to victory. The loss by Kamala-Walz showed that reasoning to be flawed, but the die was cast, and now the Dems must live with it. Will the Dems continue to fail as they did in 2024, and if so, how will they deal with that failure?
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Image: Richard O. Berry