Ramparts Magazine existed from 1962 to 1975. It was a glossy and often illustrated American political muckraker that captured the revolutionary zeitgeist of the era. Unlike most of the radical magazines of its day, Ramparts was expensively produced and stylistically sophisticated. It was first established in June 1962 by Edward M. Keating in Menlo Park, California, as a “showcase for the creative writer and as a forum for the mature American Catholic.”

The magazine declared its intent to publish fiction, poetry, art, criticism and essays of distinction, reflecting those “positive principles of the Hellenic-Christian tradition which had shaped and sustained western civilization for the previous two thousand years,” and which were, Keating believed, still needed to “guide American Catholics” in an age that had grown increasingly “secular, bewildered, and afraid.”

But under the editorship of Warren Hinckle, Ramparts look was updated, became a monthly news magazine, and moved its base of operation to San Francisco, California, which was an epicenter of the global counterculture. Robert Scheer became managing editor, and Dugald Stermer was hired as art director. The trio proceeded to turn Ramparts into one of the best known and most respected organs of the American New Left.

The New Left can perhaps best be defined as a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms. They protested against the American war in Indochina more fervently than other organized movements in the U.S.

The term New Left was first popularized in the United States in an open letter written in 1960 by sociologist C. Wright Mills titled Letter to the New Left. He argued for a new and improved leftist ideology that he hoped might transcend the traditional and often dogmatic “Old Left” which, he lamented, focused on labor issues and subsequent lack of concern for the environment and lack of concern for racism and sexism, into a broader focus on issues such as opposing alienation, anomie, and authoritarianism in all its myriad guises.

Mills argued for a shift from traditional leftism toward countercultural values. Echoing Karl Marx, Mills emphasized and advocated an international (rather than nationalistic) perspective on the movement. Mills also claimed that the proletariat (collectively the working-class referenced in Marxism) was no longer the revolutionary vanguard nor the agents of revolutionary change in the decades after World War II. The real revolutionaries were, Mills believed, young intellectuals such as college students, scholars, and editors of leftist academic books, journals, and muckraking publications.

Ramparts, perhaps more than any other American publication of the era, was especially committed to being the conspicuous voice of the American New Left. But the magazine was also, as if heeding Mills’s call, equally attuned to and committed to social movements around the world.

Many articles published in Ramparts mentioned, explicitly focused on, or published essays contributed to the magazine by several luminaries of the global New Left, including Albert Camus, Guy Debord, Simone de Beauvoir, Allen Ginsberg, Emma Goldman, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Herbert Marcuse, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leon Trotsky, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, Stokely Carmichael, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Régis Debray, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton, Carl Oglesby, Jerry Rubin, Mario Savio, Bobby Seale, Todd Gitlin, Howard Zinn, and César Chávez. The pages of Ramparts, in short, read like a who’s who of the New Left.

By September 11, 2001–twenty-six years after the magazine folded and the New Left lost one of its most dynamic amplifiers of voices critical of American corporatist conservatism – there was no viable antiwar movement or rights revolution that was even remotely comparable to the movements championed in the pages of Ramparts during the Cold War.

By the turn of the twentieth century, both major political parties in the United States were unwavering proponents of American militarism as the cornerstone institution in American life. Neither political party had programs designed to address the same inveterate racism, sexism, poverty, and degradation of the environment that were routinely addressed in the pages of Ramparts in the late 1960s to early 1970s. The militarism, corruption, warfare, and corporate welfare that Ramparts routinely exposed had, in short, not abated in the decades after the end of the Vietnam War and in many cases were far worse at the turn of the twenty-first century than they were when Ramparts went out of business in 1975.

Popularist rhetoric became particularly pervasive in the American political lexicon in the decades after the invasion of Iraq and the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009. Today, the same institutions built by liberals in the decades after World War II are, for good or ill, under assault by the far right. Their leaders claim to be saving America from the very same ideas hailed monthly over the course of more than a decade in the pages of Ramparts Magazine. One can’t help but wonder how long a publication like Ramparts could survive in this new era, what President Trump refers to as a “new age of American greatness.”