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The Rise Of The Post-New Left Political Vocabulary, Stephen D'Arcy

Stephen D'Arcy

Does the emergence of a new political vocabulary for articulating the politics of broadly leftist activists, roughly in the 1990s, reflect a learning process, so that we can think of it as more sophisticated and illuminating than the jargon of the 60s and 70s New Left — the product of a new sensitivity to key issues that were previously overlooked or badly understood? Or does its emergence, with its symptomatic timing in the wake of the Reagan/Thatcher era and the wave of defeats inflicted on the Left in those years, indicate that the new vocabulary is not so much innovation …