While I’m plugging pieces in the new TAC, I ought to put in a word about Bill Kauffman’s article on the New Left — “When the Left Was Right.” Kauffman looks at what was virtuous about Students for a Democratic Society before Bernardine Dohrn (“the bloodlusting ex-cheerleader and pinup girl of Weatherman”) and her pals blew it all to kingdom come. Kauffman calls attention back to Carl Oglesby, the Ohio-born SDS leader who believed principled radicals and conservatives could work together against the system he called (accurately) corporate liberalism. “In a strong sense,” Oglesby once wrote, “the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”

Kauffman isn’t oblivious to the difficulties of cultivating this Old Right/New Left common ground, but he argues that there’s more to the affinity than just opposition to interventionism. “The Bush wars have brought together anti-imperialists of Left and Right,” he notes, “but their coalescence is being forged not so much overseas as in our backyards.” He quotes former SDSer Paul Buhle (editor of the recently published Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History), who cites as a “wonderful example” movements for “conservation, small-town life, and the bird population” that cut across ideological lines. “All kinds of conservatives and small-town Republicans find themselves fending off new demands for exploitation of public resources (threats to water supplies and such),” Buhle says.

It’s a thought-provoking article, taking in not only Oglesby and SDS but George Wallace, William Appleman Williams, and even “Easy Rider,” the film that puts it all together (“for all their surface difference and rote hostility, the hippies and rednecks, the small farmers and shaggy communards, were on the same side,” Kauffman contends). Alongside Peter Hitchens’s piece, it makes a heck of a one-two punch. Here’s the cover:

It’ll be reaching subscribers and bookstores in the next 10 days or so. If you need more Kauffmaniana in the meantime, check out my review of Bill’s new book, Ain’t My America, from the May 5 TAC.