In a period of unprecedented material prosperity and cultural activity, the sons and daughters of the most privileged sections of the United States and of Europe decided to make their own revolution. They were the sons and daughters of the Left, better yet, the Old Left. Their parents, many of them at least, were either pink or red, that is, many of them were communists, socialists, Trotskyites, feminists, pacifists or just plain liberals. Their sons and daughters began to refer to themselves as the New Left. We'll return to this in a minute.
Alienation is the keyword here.
To be alienated is to be alone, to be isolated against your will. To be alienated is the sense of being outside, of being trapped outside. It was the feeling that you were under the control of an alien other which you simply could not identify. As you may have surmised, the Old Left had strong Marxist and socialist roots. Many members of the Old Left also had strong Leninist and in some cases, Stalinist, roots as well.