A MANIFESTO LOST IN TIME

...Whether Ronald Reagan and his counselors will rekindle the passions that once suffused the Left is, for the moment, an open question...

...authenticity is the result of an ordeal endured...

...There is, of course, a measure of truth in this...

...Those hopes today lie interred within a catacomb of caricature...

...But the specter of a world whirling out of control, of the sheer "enormity of events" that had so often resulted in resignation, was resisted...

...Marxism was not exempt...

...movement of the young...

...But intellectual sustenance came more from the likes of C. Wright Mills and Albert Camus than from Marx and Lenin...

...Past senselessness permits present brutality," the document noted, and "present brutality is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity...

...The gap between rich and poor, North and South, haves and have-nots, which grows wider with each passing year, is an abyss into which Utopias of both the Left and the Right have fallen...

...The logic of Armageddon was relentless: lunacy was the result...

...The political process remains one in which discourse is sacrificed to spectacle...

...Between the two there is a unity: It is, as Adorno wrote, an "absolute of suffering...

...Its opening sentence was memorable: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit...

...Beyond the Cold War, the Statement recognized the importance of revolutionary turmoil in the Third World...

...The Port Huron Statement tried to enrich the landscape of American political life by seeking the fulfillment of the nation's democratic promise...

...Instead, there has been a tendency to assign responsibility for its collapse on "others"—Nixon, COIN-TELPRO, red squads...

...But it was understood as a moral necessity...

...But it was too often a conceit...

...The hope that the Left could reinvent itself in the aftermath of McCarthyism and the moral collapse of the American Communist Party, amidst the general sterility and conformism of American life, was perhaps naive, even doomed...

...Economics, whether derived from Keynes or Kemp, seems to be less a science than an alchemy...

...It had no place for the human capacity for irrationality and love of the demonic, for which this century has provided a mountain of corpses as evidence...

...Political renewal is never nurtured by nostalgia...

...The ideal university was a "community of controversy" in which a genuine commitment to the life of the mind would provide the "real intellectual skills" necessary for a revived American Left...

...The archaic doctrines of past radicalism helped neither to interpret the world nor to change it...

...Incantation cannot reawaken historical memory...

...Many of the movements born under the sign of the 1960s soon offered little more than simplistic recipes for salvation, doctrines of submission that employed the language of transcendence...

...Almost always there is a gap between intentions and consequences, between theory and practice...

...But more than morality was at stake: America's stability and security were likely to be sacrificed unless some sympathy for the plight of the world's poor could be summoned...

...The Port Huron Statement did not envision a new Left anchored solely in the universities...

...Moreover, it is from a glimpse of the future, not of the past, that the struggle for justice draws its strength...

...The movement that came to be called New Left was, to be sure, rooted in part in Utopian romanticism...

...Its authors sought to create nothing less than an authentic American Left that, they hoped, would come to be regarded as a legitimate (and essential) part of the nation's political discourse...

...The New Left is, for many of its _ critics, a favorite scapegoat for the sins of America's contemporary political culture...

...If that gap is wide, those with the intentions are obliged to reexamine their expectations as well as their experience...

...For a time, the New Left seemed to advance from victory to victory, from strength to strength...

...The vision of Port Huron was buried by an avalanche of panic that swept through the New Left...

...Indeed, when it came to nuclear arms and the plight of the Third World, "the Soviet Union and the various national communist movements have aggravated international relations in inhuman and undesirable ways...

...the eventual retreat into quietism stilled the voices of many of those who might have blazed a brave new beginning...

...Few Americans are likely to remember it...

...The widespread enthusiasm for Castro was a result of the natural affinity for the young and the unorthodox: Castro was just thirty-two years old at the moment of his triumph, and his revolution, not yet tainted by dogma or repression, was the first to have been made without the participation of (and even against) the Communist Party...

...The injection of moral passion was deemed a necessary antidote to rouse an America whose political sensibilities had been dulled by alienation...

...Any new Left in America must be...

...That it finally splintered into dozens of squabbling sects whose critique of American society was derived largely from a bad conscience peculiar to the privileges of the upper middle class cannot be denied...

...To empower a citizenry increasingly cut off from the great decisions affecting its fate, it urged the "establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life...

...If history has any dialectic at all, the Port Huron Statement seemed to suggest, it is certainly not one that leads from dictatorship to decency...

...Despite feeble attempts to link the war with a more general critique of America's political economy, the escalating war rapidly proved to be the single most powerful stimulus in the growth of the New Left...

...Such charges have had a pernicious effect: An image has been promoted that bears little relation to the movement in which many were proud to participate...

...They are obsessed with the rise and fall of personalities...

...But though its grasp exceeded its reach, its original aims were admirable...

...Its aim was not merely reform, but catharsis...

...If we appear to seek the unattainable," the Statement concluded, "then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable...

...They noted the Sino-Soviet split and called for a revaluation of "monolithic interpretations" of communism...

...Political renewal, it might be argued, lies in the spirit of Port Huron...

...The Port Huron Statement, written to herald the founding of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), survives as perhaps the best expression of the New Left's intentions...

...Traditional strategies of reform were rendered obsolete...

...Moscow was a model of neither modernization nor morality...

...In the 1970s, the frantic search for a shelter from the storm led many young people to abandon politics altogether...

...The trajectory of the New Left came to be characterized, as Russell Jacoby has written, by spurts of activity followed by amnesia and exhaustion...

...The insensate cruelty of our time called into question all ideologies...

...The New Left was critical of higher education's complicity in the Cold War, and its refusal to question the assumptions that lay beneath its claim of "objectivity...

...The Left's fragmentation has resulted I in a mosaic of movements I and causes which compete to gain I the attention of a generation I come of age in the somnolent 1970s I It declared its belief in reason, in persuasion, in moral sobriety...

...To the "end of ideology" is opposed a mystique of participation...

...The result, as Christopher Lasch has observed, "imprisoned the Left in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance—a mirror-image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the Left to unmask...

...Like other young people around the world in the early 1960s, they believed they were capable of making history...

...The media are, as William Pfaff has written, "more interested in inconsequential scandal than the quality of the ideas which govern the nation...

...that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for this common participation...

...The attempt to define the New Left's mission without recourse to the vocabulary (if not the values) of Marxism was shortlived...

...The government reacted at first with surprise, then with anger, and finally with fright...

...Opposition to nuclear weapons and their testing was another...

...The fantasy of the "post-scarcity society," dearly beloved of many in the New Left, including the authors of the Port Huron Statement, was punctured in the 1970s by the realization that natural resources were finite, even if man's capacity for greed was not...

...In retrospect, the New Left, while gravely wounded by official reaction, was defeated by its inability to transcend the political culture it had hoped to transform...

...a mismanaged economy careening badly out of control, and perhaps most important, a nation that seems, every day, less governable...

...That the Port Huron Statement was written at all now seems remarkable...

...It was the Manhattan Project, the V-12 Program, the GI Bill of Rights, following upon the participation of the academic community in the New Deal, that catapulted the university into its present headlong rush...

...Such issues were thought to be linked together in a common structure of power...

...Others, disillusioned with the cult of technological progress and the alienation it spawned, and unable (or unwilling) to believe any longer in research and science—the twin gods of the post-Enlightenment West—turned toward introspection, toward the pursuit of a personal solution...

...It is not necessary to recite the familiar story of suppression: the secret—and often successful—efforts to encourage extremism, and the open campaign to crush resistance by wielding the state's powerful legal cudgel, thus draining the Left's always meager treasury and depriving it of its most able leaders...

...It is held responsible (along with Dr...

...politics but a synonym for the inability (or refusal) of politicians to deal seriously with the problems that continue to plague the country: racial hostility which, despite the gains of the civil-rights movement, seems to have deepened rather than diminished...

...It was hoped that SDS would be able to weld together such issues as racial discrimination, nuclear testing, Congressional political inquisitions, and the Cold War within a common analysis...

...An increasingly illiterate public lacks the patience for and skills of reflection, cultivating instead a passion for privatism and Pac-Man...

...The fragmentation of the Left has resulted in a mosaic of movements and causes, each of which competes against the others to gain the attention of a new generation come of age in the somnolent 1970s...

...Automation, the growth of white-collar jobs, and the service-oriented nature of capital had altered the contours of the American economy...

...the Port Huron Statement was an attempt to provide it...

...Factions and minifactions search for a new strategy, a new tactic, or failing that, a new slogan...

...withdrawal from Vietnam, is an enduring irony...

...But such tactics gave birth to what the Government had most wanted to abort: Many in the New Left succumbed to the politics of paranoia...

...The retreat from a politics that recognized the nobility of contradictions must be counted among its greatest failures...

...The Port Huron convention was planned to establish an organization to unite the grouplets of activists then springing up on university campuses...

...A reform movement had to be based mainly among labor unions, religious groups, reform-minded Democrats, peace, and civil-rights organizations, if it was to succeed...

...Though there were "no sure formulas" to guide the way to reform, the Port Huron Statement insisted that the search for theory and values was worthwhile, even as it refused the lure of ideology...

...Some renounced the often debilitating ordeal of activism...

...Implicit in the Port Huron Statement is a thirst for politics as a total art form...

...But the authors of the Port Huron Statement were reluctant to embrace the "pugnacious" and "unreasoning anti-communism" of the West...

...Extremism is elevated to the level of strategy...

...For the New Left, such self-scrutiny has been rare...

...The Port Huron Statement dismissed the Old Left as irrelevant...

...It was too often tainted (especially in the late 1960s) with a disturbing streak of intolerance and messia-nism...

...it has permitted critics to paint a portrait of a movement that those present at its creation hardly recognize...

...The world was adrift on a sea of social changes...

...It regretted the "decline in Utopia and hope," even as it acknowledged its cause in "the horrors of the Twentieth Century, symbolized in the gas ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs [which] have blasted hopefulness...

...Despite their small numbers and political anonymity, the early members and founders of SDS did not shrink from the effort...

...The virtues of patience and reflection and nonviolence embraced by the early New Left—and enshrined in the Port Huron Statement—fell victim to the Government's assault...

...Exhuming the Port Huron Statement seems an act almost of political archeology, a salvage operation...

...It hoped to break the "stalemate" of the "party overlap" of Republicans and Democrats...

...It was unable to muster the tenacity its ambition required...

...Taylor observed of Hapsburg Austria: "Grandiose, full of superficial life, yet . . . theater, not reality...

...In 1968, at the peak of the New Left's power, Jacques Barzun wrote that the "disaster" of American education had "developed with a fatal logic since the Second World War...

...Racial segregation—the wound that refused to heal—was the principal source of political in-mi spiration...

...It is, sad to say, a flaw that is embedded in the heart of the Port Huron Statement...

...And yet, one hopes that autopsy does not mean that the moment of exhausted possibilities is at hand...

...Fearful of being drafted to fight and possibly to die in a war for a dubious cause in distant lands, young men—mostly students—enrolled instead in the movement to oppose it...

...To the sluggishness of reform is opposed the cult of direct action...

...Direct action is the barometer by which commitment is measured...

...Benjamin Spock) for having shattered the nation's moral standards and puritan work ethic...

...The charge is not entirely without merit, but mostly it is a slander...

...A vision of the future that might unite the contending factions of current political ferment is nowhere to be seen...

...The Port Huron Statement spurned the easy opium of optimism...

...Today's nuclear-freeze movement has its roots in the sensibility voiced by the Port Huron Statement: "Not only is ours the first generation to live with the possibility of worldwide cataclysm—it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm...

...Sensing that something had gone awry, much of the New Left began to dabble in dogmas...

...The inability to invent a political language of its own exacted a penalty: It condemned the New Left to a kind of ahistorical wandering, a theoretical shallowness that would prove to be its undoing...

...The Port Huron Statement set in motion a movement of critical reflection and action that helped to end the American intervention in Indochina, improve the lot of the poor and the disenfranchised, and spark a cultural upheaval the effects of which are still being felt...

...Doomsday scenarios, nuclear and ecological, abound...

...Today there is a widespread disenchantment with nostrums, whether of the Right or Left...

...The ideal of a "value-free" university was, everyone agreed, entirely noble...

...But the sense of movement had been lost, and the original vision was dimmed...

...The default is unfortunate...

...The university was regarded as an "overlooked seat of influence...

...It ought not to be forgotten that the enthusiasms and expectations of the 1960s owed much to the affluence of American society...

...The need to oppose American adventurism abroad led the New Left to abandon its .agenda at home...

...Nor has what's left of the New Left understood the necessity of protecting its own past from the present's attempt to consign it to oblivion...

...The new university emerged then as the byproduct of its own war effort...

...Its dreams had been perverted by its persistent apologetics for the Soviet Union, a nation that relied "on the total suppression of organized opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized...

...It understood that the Left's critique of power, in others and in itself, gives the longing for justice its moral foundation...

...Consider the old slogans: Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day...

...rather it is one that links, in the words of Theodor Adorno, the invention of the slingshot to the atom bomb...

...To shatter resignation, rebellion is decorated with symbolic acts and varnished with the jargon of "authenticity...

...Politics was a form of Gestalt, a species of social psychoanalysis...

...Whatever its specific prescriptions, the Statement was animated by the idea of authenticity, of wholeness, of engagement...

...It is said to have prevented the assertion of American power abroad by infecting the citizenry with the dread "Vietnam syndrome...

...John Kennedy and Fidel Castro gave it hope...

...It described, often imperfectly, occasionally with eloquence, the inchoate yearnings of a generation (now middle-aged) that spent its youth acting as midwife to hopes that continue to haunt the radical imagination...

...The past is severed from the present, and Americans are strangers to their own history...

...Bigotry and the Bomb brought the New Left into being...

...It opposed the use of violence to end injustice because "it requires generally the transformations of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate...

...Successful protest required vision and program...

...And yet, twenty years after the writing of the Port Huron Statement, the twin tasks of ending the Cold War and deepening democracy have only gained in urgency...

...A taste for the apocalyptic is today shared by almost everyone, everywhere...

...It came increasingly to be seen as a superstition disguised as science...

...It noted a "moral imperative was involved in sharing the world's resources with those who have been previously dominated...

...in our society, the model citizen is too often one without memory...

...It is accused of presiding over the decline of higher education by its calls for "relevance" and its attempts to "politicize" the universities...

...It was frequently intemperate, unreasonable, arrogant—that is to say, it was a Steve Wasserman is an assistant editor of the Los Angeles Times Opinion section...

...It criticized "the politics of personality" that had permitted "image" to become "a more important mechanism than the construction of issues...

...We may be the last generation in the experiment with the living...

...If banded together in a voluntary national coalition, such groups might, it was hoped, influence the direction of the Democratic Party itself...

...One of the lessons of our sad century, it observed, was "that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to 'posterity' cannot justify the mutilations of the present...

...Today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present...

...A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual's ability to make moral distinction, it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence...

...a potential base and'agency in a movement of social change...

...Too late was it seen that there is something suspect about what amounted to a therapeutic theosophy...

...Its limits are etched in the collapse of the movement it helped to inspire...

...That it would falter—even collapse—at the moment of its greatest triumph, the U.S...

...Richard Flacks, a founder of SDS who is now a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, provided guidance and comment, though the analysis is the author's alone...

...It condemned "politics without publics," and proposed in its place "participatory democracy...

...a Left with real intellectual skill, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools...

...The 30,000-word document (drafted principally by Tom Hayden) was written in prose that was often simple and direct, remarkably free of the cliches that clutter so much of what passes for polemic today...

...It is a dialectic of defeat...

...it often encourages resignation, cynicism, and despair...

...This ambition has since come under intense criticism for having helped to "politicize" American education...

...It was bound by traditional values of naivete, anti-intellectualism, and messianism that have animated (and hobbled) most radical movements of the past...

...The Statement suggested a more enlightened policy of foreign aid to replace the "gunboat" remedies of the past...

...That the abundance of the North was directly linked to the poverty of the South was clear, that it would have to change was evident, but whether the will to do so existed was in doubt...

...The turn toward terrorism by some of the New Left's best and brightest was a tragedy...

...Precisely...

...After all, none of the fifty-three people who gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, in the spring of 1962 were yet twenty-five years old, and most were a good deal younger...

...the growth of what some have called the "permanent underclass," a breeding ground for crime and a burial pit for broken lives...

...Too few were willing to admit that the "mysticism, humanism, innocent idealism, and moral urgency" that had motivated the New Left could also fuel the fires of fanaticism...

...These are incomplete and there are no new prophets...

...Some few still seek the Holy Grail of Marxism, hoping to find in theory what practice has lost...

...Such a politics can express itself either in harmless gesture or in violent acts...

...Politics as a total art form embodies a terrible logic: Only by increasingly provocative spectacle can the veil of apathy be pierced...

...It resorted to a variety of methods designed to limit, if not eliminate, dissent...

...Demonstrations grew larger and more frequent, and the pitch of the protest became increasingly fevered...

...What's left of the Left is in disarray, its ambitions sapped by doubt and history...

...The Port Huron Statement excoriated the Soviet Union for its "dependence on aggressive military strategists," and for its "intransigency" and "evasiveness...

...Kennedy's Camelot, only slightly tarnished by the Bay of Pigs, provided a beacon for youthful hopes, and suggested the possibility of change...

...To that momentum was added, after the war, the impetus of a world power that must continue to mobilize men for global advice and creativity...

...Too often did such quests require a surrender of consciousness...

...The Port Huron Statement dared to recognize that the complexity and ambiguity inherent in human affairs did not have to impose moral or political paralysis...

...The striking disparity between the prosperity of the industrialized nations and poverty everywhere else was seen to be the single most threatening tension in the world...

...The hope of some that by tapping the radical and populist traditions of a half-century or longer ago a new "New Left" can be reborn is forlorn...

...The communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation," said the Statement...

...The Port Huron Statement rejected the Old Left as morally bankrupt...

...Modern industrial society had created institutions and forms of mass politics and culture and production that called for fresh thinking if they were to be understood...

...BY STEVE WASSERMAN This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, that seminal document of the 1960s which has never been published in full in any anthology of the New Left...

...The old contest of classes that had captured Marx's imagination in the Nineteenth Century no longer served fully to explain the upheavals of the Twentieth...

...An end to estrangement, the abolition of apathy, and the construction of community are constant refrains...

...The authors of the Statement refused to relinquish idealism, and the document was offered as an antidote to complacency, as "an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late Twentieth Century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still-unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life...

...His example was seductive: He made the vocation of rebel seem romantic...

...But it would be wrong, however tempting, to turn Port Huron into a self-serving myth...

...Its moral credit was squandered as it grew intoxicated with ideology and increasingly forsook the virtues it had once embraced...

...Politics," the Statement said, "has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into the community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life...

...Poverty does not always promote protest...

...It was, in the words of Al Haber, a co-author of the Port Huron Statement, a mixture of "mysticism, humanism, innocent idealism, and moral urgency...

...That this results, in the end, in societies capable of mutual mass murder is at the core of politics in the nuclear age...

...Still others remained loyal to the best impulses of the New Left, even as they pursued careers as teachers or writers or community organizers or lawyers...

...It deplored the exclusion of most people from "basic decisions affecting the nature and organization of work, rewards, and opportunities...

...America's political life increasingly resembles what A.J.P...

...The New Left would help create such a coalition through the force of its moral example and militant protest...

...But the failure of the New Left has more to do with a fundamentally stunted conception of politics than with the efforts of its opponents to destroy it...

...The dangerous fantasies of messianic eschatology—fantasies that are embedded in the necessarily Utopian hopes of the Left—were unleashed...

...The notion that human life can be redeemed through mystical self-revelation was resurrected...