Yet, persistent memories are not evidence of enduring success. And the recent meteoric growth of Democratic Socialists of America-now approaching 100,000 members-was last matched on the left by Students for a Democratic Society, the mostly white group of similar size that boomed with the escalation of the Vietnam War and then imploded into warring sects before the decade ended. Unknowingly or not, contemporary critics and defenders of wokeness are recapitulating the old arguments about political correctness that first erupted during the Nixon presidency.
Reports of last summer’s massive protests against police killings of African Americans often evoked the civil rights and Black Power movements led by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis. Two of the most popular films nominated for Best Picture this year-Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7-daubed the radicals of that era in seductively heroic hues. For the American left of the 1960s and early 1970s, the past refuses to stay past.
