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New Deal To New Majority: SDS’s Failure to Realign the Largest Political Coalition in the 20th Century

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2015, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies.
Many historical accounts of the failure of the New Left and the ascendency of the New Right blame either the former’s militancy and violence for its lack of success—particularly after 1968—or the latter’s natural majority among essentially conservative American voters. Additionally, most scholarship on the 1960s fails to see the New Right as a social movement. In the struggles over how we understand the 1960s, this narrative, and the memoirs of New Leftists which continue that framework, miss a much more important intellectual and cultural legacy that helps explain the movement’s internal weakness. Rather than blame “evil militants” or a fixed conservative climate that encircled the New Left with both sanctioned and unsanctioned violence and brutality––like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) counter intelligence program COINTELPRO that provide the conditions for a unstoppable tidal wave “with the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and reached its crescendo in the Moral Majority, the New Right, the Reagan administration, and neo-conservatism” (Breines “Whose New Left” 528)––the key to this legacy and its afterlives, I will argue, is the implicit (and explicit) essentialism bound to narratives of the “unwinnability” of especially the white working class. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that a Gramscian analysis resists this essentialism and fatalism, and is better suited for an historical analysis of competing social movements vying for hegemony in the 1960s.
Clayton Rosati, PhD (Advisor)
Francisco Cabanillas, PhD (Other)
Ellen Berry, PhD (Committee Member)
Oliver Boyd-Barret, PhD (Committee Member)
Bill Mullen, PhD (Committee Member)
410 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hale, M. T. (2015). New Deal To New Majority: SDS’s Failure to Realign the Largest Political Coalition in the 20th Century [Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1447966535

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hale, Michael. New Deal To New Majority: SDS’s Failure to Realign the Largest Political Coalition in the 20th Century. 2015. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1447966535.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hale, Michael. "New Deal To New Majority: SDS’s Failure to Realign the Largest Political Coalition in the 20th Century." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1447966535

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)