This volume is a series of reflections on the Port Huron Statement by participants and sympathetic academics. I have been asked to “assess . . . the contribution of [this volume] to political science.” Here, I would say that it has little to offer political science directly (unless one means it as Aristotle might), nor is this its intention. Rather, it offers material for reflection on politics: Several of its historical discussions are illuminating, and some of its assessments of where participatory democracy rests today are interesting. Fundamentally, The Port Huron Statement enables us to learn more about, or confirm what we already knew or suspected about, the American Left. Everyone who knows what Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Port Huron Statement are also knows that they were meant to drive us portside. Port Huron’s close ties with Walther Reuther’s United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the involvement of several red diaper babies is unsurprising. The essays, even the ones by younger academics, range from left to more left.
For most except the immediately affected half generation, the letters SDS now draw blank stares and then at most slow recognition. The Port Huron Statement, TOCSIN, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE)—it is all a vague antiwar, antinuclear, Cold War blur. For the authors of the Port Huron Statement, of course, SDS and the Statement were central moments. But it is less obvious than many of the writers suggest that the Statement or SDS generally were especially important for later events. One might argue that the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and opposition to the Vietnam War more profoundly affected and changed America. All note the significance for SDS itself of the Civil Rights movement that preceded Port Huron, and most admit the blindness of SDS to what would soon be the concerns of feminism. Several SDS leaders were, of course, involved in antiwar movements, but opposition to the war, and the results of that opposition, had causes and effects much beyond SDS itself.
In fact, the standard bearers for the Left have been successful in later years, but not primarily in the way or for the reasons that the volume’s authors acknowledge. Their interests range from participatory democracy to traditional Marxist economic analyses. However, what leads the country leftward today is not the variants and factors in these analyses, or the Occupy Wall Street movement (with which several of them are taken), but, rather, the legalizing and bureaucratizing of impositions on individual freedom in the name of equality, environment, and health care. Not participatory action (even in its social media forms) but, rather, the rigid controls that stem from law school liberalism are progressivism’s current face.
Marxist analysis, however, was not Port Huron’s only strain. One element highlighted in these essays is the importance for the Statement of quasi-existential views about authenticity, somewhat along the lines of Herbert Marcuse’s blend of an updated Marxism and existentialism in One Dimensional Man (1964) or even Eros and Civilization (1955), but with a more bourgeois tone. A second highlighted and often overlooked element is the importance of John Dewey, and not only C. Wright Mills and Arnold Kaufman.
Whatever their merit, the essays display the defects and omissions that someone right of center has come to expect from those on the left. I will point out four of these. First, the material plenty and massive opportunities made available by individual liberty in free markets are taken for granted. When the comfort of the Port Huron authors’ generation is noted (by several authors), it is as if it had dropped from the sky. The economy is treated either as a product of global oligarchies or as a place for communal sharing. If there are problems, it is big corporations or Wall Street that have caused them, never government or consumer demand. The way that business and entrepreneurial activity is itself so often a field for responsibility and self-mastery is ignored.
Second, the thousand ways in which Americans participate politically beyond mere voting—on school boards, juries, townships governments, and voluntary organizations—is given short or nonexistent shrift. Religion, a basic way that brings people of different classes together, and a major factor in abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement, is ignored. Many authors still worry about how much actual participation their often meager examples of participatory democracy require, while still others make clear that “participatory democracy” is an Americanized term whose real meaning is socialism. In both cases, many of our actual modes of participation and the institutions that foster them are downplayed.
A third difficulty is that equality always seems to be preferred to freedom, whatever the rhetoric, and freedom itself is almost completely divorced from any sense of natural rights. If freedom is mentioned, one hears only the vagueness of authenticity (or references to Mario Savio) and, even there, from the original Port Huron view until today, the inconsistencies among individual freedom, communal control, and more equalized distribution are not addressed. One cannot have individual autonomy and fulfillment while also ceding more and more control to participatory and even consensus groups.
As I suggested, moreover, the authors do not come to grips with the discrepancy between participatory democracy (or self-government generally) and the excessive importance of our courts and bureaucracies. The general sense on the left, right, and center that too much that is significant is outside one’s best efforts to govern it is connected to bureaucracies and courts that are increasingly arbitrary and hard to control. A large amount of this bureaucratic dominance has arisen because of the Left’s goals and the methods used to advance them. It is myopic to fail to see this.
A fourth issue is the easy view that the growth of the American Right was primarily reactive, and where not reactive, manipulated. There is more than an echo of the old Cold War Marxism here. But a fair analysis of the growth of the contemporary Right makes visible its roots in the attempt to advance liberty—individual rights, less regulated markets, and American international success. In this vein, it is remarkable how the end of the Cold War is taken for granted, and Ronald Reagan’s part in successfully ending it left unmentioned.
