The historical literature on the politics of the 1960s is growing rapidly, and it defies easy characterization. Many historians who write about the decade participated in important events that transpired during it. Like all historical literature, literature on the 1960s reflects the views and concerns of the authors who produce it.

David Burner in Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) criticizes New Left politics more harshly than Brinkley does. Burner sees a history of tragic decline, from the moral clarity of the civil-rights movement to the self-indulgence of black power, from the pragmatism of the Kennedy administration to the narcissism and irrationality of the counterculture, from transcendent public commitment to narrow personal fulfillment, from unifying New Deal liberalism to divisive identity politics. Burner recognizes liberalism's internal contradiction, its dual insistence on personal freedom and the rule of law, and he blames liberalism's implosion on the rebels of the 1960s. In their fight against conventions and for personal liberation, they offered no workable definition of community. They thereby undermined the New Deal vision of a commonwealth at work and paved the way for a politics of consumption rooted in free-market ideology.

Edward P. Morgan is more generous in his assessment of the New Left. In The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), he stresses the positive accomplishments of the period's social movements: the end of legalized racism, the expansion of democratic values, legal and political limits on the rush to war, a critique and opening up of educational institutions, an awareness of ecology, the assertion of gender equality, the beginning of the gay-rights movement, and a healthy skepticism of a remote government, corporate power, and social authorities. Morgan is more critical of liberalism, however, than are either Brinkley or Burner. In liberalism, Morgan sees a contradiction between two impulses. Liberalism embraces an inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic society even as it embraces the ideology and institutions of capitalism. Morgan is more accepting of the New Left critique of liberalism. For an example of that critique, see the Port Huron Statement at http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.htm.

On the issue of the impact of the student movement, historians also disagree. James T. Patterson in Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) notes that the student protests and other movements that contributed so mightily to the New Left "hardly added up to a coherent movement, or even a clearly visible pattern." Patterson credits the student protests with "reinvigorat[ing] the political and cultural Left in the United States," but he stresses their limited nature, noting that they were clustered in the nation's elite colleges and universities and that the coverage they received from the news media (and especially in the increasingly influential medium of television) was disproportionate to the numbers of people who participated in them.

Dominick Cavallo in A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin's, 1999) is not directly concerned either to criticize or defend the New Left. Rather he situates the New Left within American historical traditions. The New Left, Cavallo argues, was not a cultural or political anomaly but actually echoed many of the nation's most important intellectual and political strains of the past. For example, he finds antecedents for Bob Dylan in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for Neil Young in Walt Whitman. He notes the similarities between Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Anti-Federalists, who in the late 1780s opposed ratification of the proposed federal constitution; both groups warned against the dangers posed by the undue power and influence of special interests and by government when it has grown remote from the people it seeks to represent.