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Michael Kazin is a historian of American labor and social movements, and co-editor of Dissent magazine. As a student at Harvard in the late 1960s, he was a leader within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and played a part in its short-lived militant faction, the Weatherman. In this conversation, Kazin reflects on his path \u201cfrom revolutionary to professor,\u201d explaining how his early experiences in the New Left inform his analysis of the massive political shifts over the decades that followed. In explaining the recent popularity of left figures and organizations, from Bernie Sanders to the DSA, Kazin sees liberal failure as a significant part of the equation:

\u201cWhen liberals are in power, it actually helps the left, because they make promises they don\u2019t keep. The left grew in the 60s under liberal presidents, the left grew in the 30s under Franklin Roosevelt, the left grew under Woodrow Wilson before then, and the left grew under Abraham Lincoln, who was in effect a progressive though no one used that term at the time.

And so people, especially young people say \u2018I thought Obama was gonna do all this great stuff\u2014 he talked about a movement, he was gonna stop climate change, he was gonna get everybody better wages, he was gonna help unions organize.\u2019 And the financial crisis made it seem as though, maybe capitalism\u2019s not so great after all. Maybe this globalized economy, what some people call neoliberalism, made promises it couldn\u2019t keep.

So under Obama, we have Black Lives Matter, we have Occupy . . . and people are open to hearing the kinds of things that Sanders has been saying for 50 years.\u201d