WI: The Democrats abandon the new left?

Exactly what it says on the tin

How are the Democrats in 2016?
New Left takes over another party or makes a new one possible?
 
The only way I see them totally abandoning the New Left is that it becomes more violent than it was. It was mostly youth oriented and parties naturally want younger members as they are the future of the party.

The New Left would have to do bombing campaigns, assassinations and wide spread full scale riots. Basically it becomes violent enough that everyone not part of it distances themselves from it. In which case the various ideas of the New Left are discredited.
 
The only way I see them totally abandoning the New Left is that it becomes more violent than it was. It was mostly youth oriented and parties naturally want younger members as they are the future of the party.

The New Left would have to do bombing campaigns, assassinations and wide spread full scale riots. Basically it becomes violent enough that everyone not part of it distances themselves from it. In which case the various ideas of the New Left are discredited.

Wouldn't a bigger landslide for Nixon have discredited the New Left as well?
 
Exactly what it says on the tin

I don't quite get it. With the possible exception of 1972, I don't think they ever *embraced* the New Left. Carter may not have increased military spending enough to suit the tastes of *Commentary* magazine but that did not make him another Tom Hayden. Mondale bashed Gary Hart for refusing to categorize Cuba as totalitarian. http://www.csmonitor.com/1984/0320/032019.html In 1988, Jackson, not Dukakis, was the candidate the remaining New Leftists favored. In 1992, Bill Clinton backed capital punishment and blasted Sister Souljah. And so on...
 
I don't quite get it. With the possible exception of 1972, I don't think they ever *embraced* the New Left. Carter may not have increased military spending enough to suit the tastes of *Commentary* magazine but that did not make him another Tom Hayden. Mondale bashed Gary Hart for refusing to categorize Cuba as totalitarian. http://www.csmonitor.com/1984/0320/032019.html In 1988, Jackson, not Dukakis, was the candidate the remaining New Leftists favored. In 1992, Bill Clinton backed capital punishment and blasted Sister Souljah. And so on...

I think it depends what we mean by "embrace", and also maybe what we mean by "New Left". Didn't McGovern make a bunch of reforms for the '72 convention that were supposed to give more weight to the votes of youth, feminists, and racial minorities ie. the kind of people supposedly represented by the New Left, rather than older union members?

Of course, Democratic candidates never went as far to the left as the New Left would have wanted(if indeed the New Left had placed any hope in the Democratic Party to begin with), and their presidential candidates made a show of NOT kow-towing to "special interests"(eg. Clinton dissing Sister Souljah), but that's not the same thing as saying that they never tried to appeal to the New Left. I don't think you'd ever see a situation where the Democrats, at least at the presidential level, would say to the voters "If you cheered for the Chicago Seven, we don't want your vote". Because that would have removed a significant section of their electoral base.
 
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