During the late 1950s and 1960s, radical activism underwent a significant transformation, as protest politics turned to revolutionary ardor. Much has been written on this subject, and it is impossible to treat the topic adequately here. Nevertheless, some discussion bears directly on the question of anti-Americanism on the American left. These movements all had to break with the enforced quietude of the 1950s that anti-communist repression and McCarthyite hysteria had imposed; but the largely black civil rights movement in the South and the mostly white student movement (in the North) experienced that break differently. Black activism was initially spurred by returning veterans of World War Two, who had fought fascism abroad and were ready to fight racism at home. Although generational differences existed among black people, the principal institution of community life—the church—became a center of movement activity. Taken together with other factors, black activism was thus organically linked to a long history of struggle for freedom and democracy in American life. At the same time, many activists began to understand themselves as part of a distinctive nationalism in an era marked by de-colonization and national liberation.
While some white activists, particularly those associated with the civil rights struggle in the South, had ties to previous movements on the left, the core of the white student movement experienced a greater disjuncture between themselves and the (middle class) society from which they sprang. They saw in their families and communities and country immoral consumerism compounded by virulent racism and militarism. And as the Vietnam War intensified and protest turned to anti-imperialist politics, some activists came to identify themselves as revolutionaries opposed to all things American.
This anti-Americanism had at moments a distinctly American expression. A generational separatism was conjured up under several rubrics, for example, including one called Woodstock Nation. At other moments, white anti-imperialism developed a more internationalist outlook. A serious search for a revolutionary agency began. Some saw it in youth subcultures in the United States and Europe. Others found it in national liberation movements—like that of the Vietnamese—outside the borders of the United States as well as inside. By this account—initiated by organizations such as the Black Panther Party—the black freedom struggle became a national liberation movement, an anti-colonial phenomenon inside American borders, but outside the American national story. Black people (and Mexican-Americans or Chicanos) became, like Puerto Ricans, “non-Americans.” And to the extent that white people joined this anti-colonial struggle, they became like a Fifth Column inside the Metropolitan center, “anti-Americans” fighting Amerikkka. Completely gone were the days like those in the 1930s, when the Communist Party declared that communism was twentieth century Americanism.
Such a distinctly anti-American approach and organizing identity was, of course, impossible to maintain. And as national liberation movements lost some of their luster in the 1970s—particularly after the battles between Vietnam and China—the concept of a white fifth column fell apart. Further, when ostensibly anti-imperialist, but fundamentally reactionary, movements emerged in the Third World, like the clerical fascists that opposed the Shah’s regime in Iran, this wing of the left was both theoretically and practically unprepared. The bi-polar metropolitan-periphery model of international struggle fell apart. A decade later, when the Soviet bloc collapsed, theoretical models of imperialism and anti-imperialism inherited from the 1960s failed to explain world events. “Anti-Americanism” was without a rational home.
In the years since, the American left has faced new challenges with the growth of a white nationalist movement opposed to the status quo, and as an accelerated horizontal transfer of capital and labor across borders has undermined the traditional market-defining character of the modern nation-state. Nevertheless, the old bi-polar model has retained its influence among some anti-imperialists. And Noam Chomsky has emerged as the principal spokesperson for the older “anti-American” anti-imperialism. Ironically, Chomsky’s status has risen almost in direct proportion to the decline in the left’s power and prospects.
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