How the Democrats Went Left

Will the Dems continue to fail as they did in 2024, and if so, how will they deal with that failure?

E. Jeffrey Ludwig | August 7, 2026

Abbie Hoffman was a colorful radical who led a group called the Yippies (derived from the name Youth International Party, founded in 1967) along with Jerry Rubin, who eventually left the radical movement of Yippie-dom to become a stockbroker. Abbie wrote a best-selling book titled Revolution for the Hell of It and was known for combining mockery and humor with his revolutionary fervor. On one occasion, he went to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and threw dollar bills from the visitors’ balcony towards the floor of the Exchange. It was Abbie’s way of mocking the money-focus of the NYSE and of American society.

Hoffman was a graduate of Brandeis University, where as an undergraduate, he took courses taught by a professorial savant by the name of Prof. Herbert Marcuse. Prof. Marcuse was one of a group of academics known as the Frankfurt School, who had migrated to the USA from Germany to escape the threat of Nazi persecution for their Marxist views. The Nazis also wanted strict government control of the economy, but private ownership of property was still allowed (however, ownership without having the final say over the use or disposal of that property or its attendant finances is at variance with the classic definition of "ownership").

The Frankfurt School professors who fled Germany were not merely bourgeois, freedom-loving critics of Nazism, but were full-blown communists. In one of his books, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote, “The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counter revolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi........

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