1、《休伦港宣言》
背景：1962年6月，45名新左派青年在密歇根州的休伦港机会，通过了一份长达62页的《休伦港宣言》（Port Huron Statement），该宣言称为“美国新左派的第一篇宣言”，那些学生大多来自“学生争取民主社会组织”（Students for a Democratic Society, SDS）。
《休伦港宣言》Port Huron Statement
Introduction: Agenda for a Generation
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of ,by, and for the people--these American values we found god, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency. 我们是当代人，在至少是小康的环境中长大，目前住在大学校园里，正忐忑不安地注视着我们所继承的世界。当我们还是幼童时，美国是世界上最富裕、最强大的国家，当时唯有它拥有原子弹，它最少受到现代战争的侵害，而且它是联合国的发起国，我们认为该组织将把西方的影响扩散到全世界的一个发起国。人人自由平等，民有、民治、民享的政府，我们那时觉得这些美国价值观念很好，是我们安身立命的原则。我们中许多人在自满情绪中成长。
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution. 然而随着年龄增长，我们的舒适安逸被一个又一个不能不令人焦虑的事件所打破。先是南方反种族偏见斗争所昭示的无所不在、令人痛苦的人格贬黜的事实，迫使我们大多数人从沉默变为积极行动。其次，由于原子弹的存在所象征的冷战笼罩世界的事实，使我们意识到：我们自己、我们的朋友以及千百万我们因共同的危险更加了解的抽象的“其他人”随时可能死去。对别的人类问题我们可以故意忽视、回避或麻木不仁，但这两个问题则不然，因为它们的冲击太直接太猛烈，它们对我们提出的要求太富有挑战性——要求我们每个人为冲突和问题的解决负起责任。
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concern, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo. 当这些和其他问题或直接压在我们身上或折磨我们的良心，成为我们自己关切的事，我们也开始看到我们周围的美国复杂而令人不安的自相矛盾现象。在南方及北方大城市中黑人生活的现实面前，“人人生而平等……”的宣言显得何等虚伪。美国所宣传的和平意图与它在冷战现状中的经济和军事投资互相抵触。
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people." 我们已亲眼目睹，而且将继续看到其他自相矛盾的种种怪象。依靠核能很容易向一座座城市提供全部电力，然而那些占据支配地位的民族国家似乎更有可能发动人类战争史上规模空前的毁灭性战争。虽然我们的技术正摧毁旧的社会组织形式，创造新的社会组织形式，人们仍在容忍徒劳无功的工作和懒懒散散，无所事事。三分之二的人类正苦于营养不良，而我们自己的上流社会却穷奢极欲，纸醉金迷。虽然世界人口预计在四十年后将增加一倍，各国仍听任无政府主义成为国际行动的一大原则，而不加节制的开采正耗尽地球的自然资源。虽然人类亟需革命的领导，美国却安于国家的僵局。它的目标模糊不清，模棱两可，受传统框架束缚。它的民主制度与其说是“民有，民治，民享”，还不如说是冷漠无情的，为权势所操纵摆布。
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The world-wide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, super technology― these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval. 不仅我们关于美国人美德的意象蒙上了污点，不仅因美国理想的虚伪性被揭穿引起幻想破灭，而且我们开始感到，原来我们心目中的美国黄金时代其实是一个时代的衰落。在世界范围爆发的反对殖民主义和帝国主义的革命、极权主义国家的牢固确立、战争威胁、人口膨胀、国际秩序混乱、超技术等等，这些趋势正考验我们自己为民主和自由承担义务的坚韧性，考验我们在一个动乱的世界实现民主和自由的能力。
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority― the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through," beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.
Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity― but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life. 有些人希望我们相信，美国人在繁荣昌盛中感到心满意足，把这称为他们对自己在新的世界中的作用内心深处的忧虑外表涂上的一层釉彩岂不更好？如果说这种焦虑造成对人类事务更不关心的冷漠态度，难道它不也会引起对以下信念的渴求，现状有可代替的东西，人们能够采取行动以改变学校、工厂、官僚体制和政府的状况？这种渴求既是变革的导火线，又是变革的动力，我们正是向人们的这种渴求发出呼吁。为现状寻求真正民主的替代物，承担对它们进行社会实验的义务，是有价值、能充分发挥才能的人类事业，这项事业今天推动我们前进，我们也希望它推动别人前进。正是在此基础上，我们提出这份关于我们的信念和分析的文件。作为二十世纪后期理解和改变人类状况的一种努力，它植根于这样一个古老的、至今尚未实现的设想——人获得左右自己生活环境的力量。
2、内在批判
SDS的前任主席卡尔·奥格尔斯的总结：革命的基本动机不是建设一个天堂，而是破坏一个地狱。革命者对于未来想要什么这个问题的回答是：不要现在已有的东西！不幸的是，对于新左派的最合适的定义，即对它所具有的结构和它的组织以及领导人的定义，都是从否定性的角度来论述的，至少在一切已发生的运动中，我们知道新左派反对什么，拒绝什么，但是没有一个人知道它要什么。
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