Over fifty years ago, when the American capitalist state was trying to figure out how to respond to the rise of the country’s social movements, one of the U.S. communist movement’s great leaders Gus Hall warned about how the state could gain a winning amount of leverage. He identified the problem of petty-bourgeois radicalism, the ideology of dogmatic opportunism and idealism that’s come to dominate American activist circles. This way of thinking, due to its rejection of building a relationship with a majority of the people, is a useful tool the state can use to render radical movements ineffectual. All the ruling class needed to do was learn to weaponize petty-bourgeois radicalism against the effective elements of the workers movement, and the New Left would become an asset for the capitalist state.