At an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in the spring of 1967, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and the San Francisco hippie group “the Diggers” burst into the middle of Tom Hayden’s keynote speech, screaming that the people in the room didn’t have the balls to make a revolution, they’d piss in their pants when the violence erupted. For SDS, the arrival of the counterculture wildmen was a disaster; Todd Gitlin later wrote that in its wake the New Left failed to “outgrow the student movement.” For Abbie Hoffman, the conference had been “monumental,” an event he gladly added to his résumé of political action.

The anecdote is significant. If you think that the New Left was the sixties, the disruption is anxiety-provoking. If you think the sixties only included the left, it is alarming but vital. If, on the third hand, you think—as I do—that the sixties was the beginning of thirty years of politics in the street that changed the self-description of people aro...

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