THE NEW RIGHT ISN'T SO NEW

IN THE CLOSING weeks of 1969, a debate broke out in the pages of National Review about how American conservatives should respond to the threat posed by the New Left—the expanded universe of socialists, civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, feminists, environmentalists, and other lefty radicals then making political waves. Fifteen months earlier, police and demonstrators had met in a bloody clash outside the Democratic National Convention.

- STEPHANIE SLADE

The year before that had seen the storied “summer of love,” coverage of which drove home for many Americans the sweeping cultural changes that were afoot.

For an ornery political science professor named Donald Atwell Zoll, the implications of these developments were clear: Conservatives must reject liberalism’s thanatos, or death wish—“its preference for extinction (with its ideological purities preserved) as against adaptation or revision.” By purities, he meant commitments to pluralism, individualism, and proceduralism, the “rules of the game” by which liberals were convinced opposing groups could coexist in peace.

The core problem, Zoll wrote, was that the New Left had proven itself uninterested in playing by those rules. “Its adherents were obviously willing to shoot at people,” he claimed. “When they talked about ‘revolution,’ they meant storming a hundred Bastilles, not changing the minds of men after the fashion of older and more comfortable collectivists.”

In response, liberalism might have opted to “repress its opponents...thus entailing a candid recognition that it had real live opponents.” Alas, “the liberal establishment was unwilling to embrace” any solution that “would involve the abrogation of its ‘democratic’ preferences.” This, Zoll thought, put conservatives in a sticky situation. They could either “go down with liberalism, clinging to the common values and abiding by the traditional rules of the game,” or they could “elect to fight, uninhibited by the liberal thanatos or by liberal proprieties as to method.”