In both years, radical movements mainly of the young made daring, if ill-prepared, assaults on the forces of order. All were crushed and defeated, and the defeats ushered in a long period of left retrenchment and conservative triumph. That temptation should be resisted.
The populist right also became a mass movement in the late 1960s and quickly seized the political offensive. In the United States and later in Britain, it took over a major party and won several national elections. There and elsewhere in the developed capitalist world, left-wing parties stopped touting big, egalitarian policies and began to hum the praises of entrepreneurs and free markets. Four decades after 1848, a far stronger left had been born, based in mass socialist parties of the working class. A year later, they founded t...
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