So, if I'm understanding Left Twitter today, there are people out there arguing because the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots allied together, that means that the Boogaloos should be welcomed as comrades?

I don't claim to be a specialist on the history of the New Left in Chicago, but this seems... wrong.

As far as I can tell, it's based on a fundamental misreading of the semiotics of the Confederacy by the counterculture in the '60s and '70s -- the assumption that because they used the Stars and Bars, the Young Patriots were neo-Confederates.

They were not.

@jack_hamilton's essay on The Band and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is useful here.

The song is problematic for a variety of reasons, but it's not really correct to call it a neo-Confederate anthem. https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/night-they-drove-old-dixie-down-band-confederate.html

It was rather part of a broader obsession with "roots" and "authenticity" deployed to particular cultural and political ends.

To put another way, Joan Baez covered "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" at a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden in 1975 for Hurricane Carter in front of Coretta Scott King.

Merle Haggard did NOT play that concert.

One of the things the Young Patriots -- or their less political musical counterparts like The Band and Joan Baez -- did NOT do was to constantly make jokes about killing communists, and even occasionally try to pop a few, which is arguably the more important semiotic difference.

The better analogy to today is not the Young Patriots, which was after all founded by SDS alum, but the Klan, the American Nazi Party, and -- less radically -- the Birchers.

Nobody -- and I mean *nobody* -- in the '60s and '70s thought the New Left should ally with them.