The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged in the United States and Western Europe during the late 1950s and reached its peak influence in the 1960s and early 1970s. It is generally defined by its rejection of both the Old Left's emphasis on organized labor and Marxist-Leninist party structures and of Cold War liberal anticommunism, in favor of participatory democracy, civil rights, anti-imperialism, and cultural transformation. The boundaries of the term are contested: some analysts treat it as a coherent ideological tendency, while others describe it as a loose coalition of student activists, civil rights organizers, feminists, and antiwar protesters united more by opposition than by any shared program. See new-left-definition-debate for competing framings.

Historians broadly agree that the New Left was catalyzed by the civil rights movement, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and disillusionment with the Democratic Party establishment. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its 1962 Port Huron Statement are widely treated as organizational and ideological touchstones for the American New Left. The movement is associated with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (1964), the antiwar mobilizations of 1967-1969, and campus occupations across the country.

Scholarly debate continues over several questions: whether the New Left ultimately strengthened or fragmented American progressive politics; how to assess its relationship to liberalism and to more radical tendencies including Maoism and anarchism; and the degree to which cultural politics displaced rather than complemented economic analysis. The movement's relationship to the civil rights and Black Power movements is also a subject of ongoing historiographical discussion, particularly regarding the roles of race and organizational autonomy within coalition politics.

For detailed historical treatment, see new-left-history.

* Participatory democratic reform viewpoint - Associated with early SDS and figures such as Tom Hayden, this position held that the New Left represented a necessary renewal of democratic practice against bureaucratic liberalism and Cold War consensus politics. new-left-participatory-democracy-viewpoint

* Conservative critical viewpoint - From the American conservative perspective, the New Left is assessed as having undermined social cohesion, traditional institutions, and anticommunist resolve; its cultural legacy is seen as corrosive to civic and moral order. new-left-conservative-critical-viewpoint

* Old Left and labor-left critique viewpoint - Some on the socialist and labor left argued that the New Left's cultural emphasis and hostility to working-class institutions weakened class-based organizing and produced no durable political infrastructure. new-left-old-left-critique-viewpoint

* Feminist re-evaluation viewpoint - Feminist historians and participants documented systematic marginalization of women within New Left organizations, leading to the argument that the movement's democratic ideals were inconsistently applied internally, and that this tension was generative for second-wave feminism. new-left-feminist-reevaluation-viewpoint

* Revisionist vindication viewpoint - Some historians argue that the New Left's long-term influence-on environmentalism, feminism, identity politics, and civil liberties law-constitutes a substantive political legacy that earlier dismissals underestimated. new-left-revisionist-vindication-viewpoint

* The Weathermen and political violence - The 1969 factional split within SDS that produced the Weather Underground and its turn to bombings generated lasting dispute over the movement's relationship to political violence and the consequences of radicalization. new-left-weathermen-violence-controversy

* FBI COINTELPRO targeting - Federal surveillance and disruption operations directed at New Left organizations generated documented disputes about state conduct, civil liberties, and the extent to which infiltration shaped the movement's internal conflicts and collapse. new-left-cointelpro-controversy

* Race and coalition politics - The organizational separation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from majority-white New Left groups in the mid-1960s is a contested episode involving competing accounts of solidarity, paternalism, and Black self-determination. new-left-race-coalition-controversy

* new-left-history * new-left-definition-debate * new-left-participatory-democracy-viewpoint * new-left-conservative-critical-viewpoint * new-left-old-left-critique-viewpoint * new-left-feminist-reevaluation-viewpoint * new-left-revisionist-vindication-viewpoint * new-left-weathermen-violence-controversy * new-left-cointelpro-controversy * new-left-race-coalition-controversy * Counterculture 1960s * students-for-a-democratic-society * port-huron-statement * Civil Rights Movement * vietnam-war-antiwar-movement * old-left * participatory-democracy

1. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987). 2. James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 3. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979). 5. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 6. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 7. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 8. Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007). 9. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1990).