Are You Feeling Like It’s 1961?

Perhaps, this time we should be looking for a group other than college students to reinvigorate democracy.

The Port Huron Steatement is now just over 60 years old.
Twenty some years ago I had an undergrad comp class read it.
It was a challenge to get them to read it (TL:DR), but I reminded them they were reading a statement written by students like them, and that the authors were probably about the same age as their parents were in 2002….
Overwhelming response was not to content or quality of the argument. They just couldn’t engage with it.
The statement is hyperlinked here…print it out and read it.
The “Liberal Papers” is free in Internet Archives if you can’t find it in your local library system.
These were good ideas then and remain good ideas now. But now there is no place to consider, discuss and develop them for any implementation.

I’ll believe that the yut’ are different when I start seeing a relative decline in business, economics, and communications majors, and a relative increase in humanities majors. (STEM people are a lot less vocational than you might think.)

Hmm… the Port Huron Statement? What about the original Port Huron Statement. Not the compromised second draft: https://youtu.be/rGU1adom9rM?si=hByKVDq18j0cFRsT&t=45

SDS had a fairly important effect on the early days of the antiwar movement, but faded later as it became too extreme for the rest of the antiwar movement. It had no effect at all on various economic justice efforts. So, good at early messaging, not important after that.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood but it seems like a lot of the problems are still with us while a lot of the “solutions” have been completely coopted. Eg

the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as the extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms the honest searching of many students to a ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness to present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift within the university toward the value standards of business and the administrative mentality

and

work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility

There’s no doubt that college students are more politically activated today than they were under Obama, and they are pissed off. However, SDS is not a good analogy: means and ends are both dramatically different.

The SDS generation was a mostly white cohort that was under the influence of postwar existentialism; it looked to politics as a way to discover a more “authentic” existence. It was a context when the economic existence of the average white American seemed secure, and students had the luxury of worrying about the country’s moral spirit rather than just self-interest. Today’s students have vastly more pragmatic concerns.

I find generational level comparisons rarely useful. Aside from the obvious, that generational cohorts are not uniform, these cohorts themselves change within their own generational period.

SDS in the infancy of the Port Huron statement had little in common with SDS of 1966 onward much less with the Weatherman faction post 1969. And SDS was a tiny organization with a presence magnified by the popular press. The anti-war movement as a mass movement was motivated by a pragmatic concern; not being drafted to fight in Vietnam. The movement dwindled away following Nixon’s Vietnamizaton policy and the last draft induction at the end of 1972.

The first quoted passage by engels @11 (from the Port Huron Statement, I assume) has a very contemporary ring, esp since most would probably say that the power and size of “the administrative bureaucracy” in universities has increased since 1962.

While the Port Huron Statement was a collective document, its main author was Tom Hayden, who was influenced by, among others, Arnold Kaufman. CT contributor Eric Schliesser wrote a blog post about Kaufman last year (see also a 1984 piece on Kaufman by Kevin Mattson in Dissent):

https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2022/05/mediating-between-strauss-and-dewey-the-forgotten-radical-liberal-arnold-kaufman.html

I think it’s worth noting that the political landscape in Michigan completely transformed after 2016. On the ‘strength’ of Trump’s razor-thin victory, Trump allies took control of and effectively killed off the long-standing centrist, business-oriented Republican Party in Michigan and made the new version of the party politically irrelevant. Democrats in Michigan now control everything — not just the governorship, but all of the statewide offices. And the supreme court. And both houses of the legislature. The abortion rights referendum passed by a wide margin. Democrats, who completed their takeover last year with the capture of the legislature, have been steadily ticking off longstanding progressive goals, one after another. Next up in the new session are mandatory paid family leave and 100% renewable power.

The problem for progressives in Michigan now isn’t taking control, but rather making a success of what they have won. One worrying early sign is that the state’s population has begun shrinking again following some slow growth during the 2010s. I wonder — would a form of student activism be possible that includes sticking around after graduation and maybe even procreating? That seems more appropriate for the current situation than a new Port Huron statement.

@ oldster

Istm you’re setting a very high bar for something to escape the category of “epiphenomenal.”

Apart perhaps from Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique(1963), whose impact took a while to show up fully in the culture, is there any piece of writing from “the sixties” of which one could not say that events and trends would have unfolded in much the same way if it had never been written?

“I wonder — would a form of student activism be possible that includes sticking around after graduation and maybe even procreating? That seems more appropriate for the current situation than a new Port Huron statement.”

I don’t think the current generation is in any hurry to settle into domestic complacency and start pumping out kids straight out of college like so many 60s students (even the “radicals”) did. That lifestyle was premised on a whole freight of class assumptions (easy credit/affluent parents, low student debt, access to professional jobs without work experience, a stable housing market, etc.) that no longer apply and in many cases haven’t applied for decades so even students’ parents (if they went to college) had their “college experiences” end with a whimper of stagflation, Reaganomics, and the hollowing out of the middle class. Too many parents and role models became convinced that their superior education was what allowed them to ride out the wave of de-industrialization and pushed that model on the next generations without realizing that everyone else’s kid got the same message (what were the alternatives?) while the schools just weren’t what they used to be.

Students in this century are a vastly larger segment of the population. More people are going the “some college” route with state school and community college enrollment exploding and iconic SLACs like Swarthmore becoming increasingly irrelevant to the conversation except as prestige tokens for competitive grad school admissions. The “grad school coccoon,” meanwhile, has also sprawled out to be something of a lifestyle for people who’ve been spooked or wounded by a brutal job market, scarce housing, and the self-esteem shattering shock of going from being a bright kid at a good school to an underemployed gig worker or the junior employee barely trusted to get coffee. That sort of crash landing is hard enough to take at 20 with a good career ahead of you, but if you’re over 30 amd struggling to support yourself and avoid the social stigma of “boomeranging” back to the family home, and feel as likely to be downsized as promoted, “settling down” starts to sound like a poverty trap.

So we stumble on as best we can amidst patronising narratives of “failure to launch” and “milennial angst” and and a disempowering discourse of crisis, fragility, precarity, extended adolescence and grief for the coddled and overstimulated lost souls of the smartphone generation who don’t even know how to have unprotected sex anymore. Not that the “leave them kids alone” side of things is much better. We’re well into our second decade of being told (and telling each other) how screwed the younger generations are and how much better the (affluent, white) older generations had it and I don’t think that’s been good for us either. Everyone from shut-in screen addicts to the superannuated grad students shamebragging about being “too busy to date” seems to have some generational narrative for why it’s not worth trying to escape their suffocating comfort zone.

The aspirational Instagram yoga and scented candles stuff and the Business Insider hustle culture fantasies about house flipping 20-something millionaires with three jobs and no expenses aren’t any better (and don’t help with the feelings of inadequacy), but I get pretty sick of the clickbait about how we’re all having mental health crises because of climate change and mass extinction and the imminent collapse of democracy and there’s nothing we can do about it because capitalism and racist old people screwed us and are killing the planet and refuse to die.

We’re told being “childfree” isn’t just a personal choice but a political one and that it’s selfish to want to bring kids into a world of precarity, overpopulation, and climate collapse and how our overconsumption and addiction to growth is dooming the planet. We’re also told how selfish and solipsistic it is not to have kids and sustain the population and subjected to endless, breathless warnings about “graying” populations and the looming demographic crisis.

It’s all a lot to take, especially when most of us are our own people with our own problems that aren’t obviously related to big picture zeitgeist stuff or really that different from previous generations. If “Boomers” (a group that apparently includes people born more than a decade after the Baby Boom) had our problems, they’d probably complain the same way, and if we had theirs, we’d be pretty annoyed at being unappreciated and blamed for everything. We are all a product of our circumstances, but our own people as well and are generally doing our best and should try to understand each other. Or at least that’s how I feel before some silly out-of-touch person tells us that the real concern of the consciencious young student activist should be “sticking around” and “procreating” without the slightest acknowledgement of why that isn’t happening or how it might relate to the raft of issues conscientious young people are currently talking about.

Doug M. @20 –

I think the Port Huron Statement is most influential on the Right. Its impact on leftist movements was modest, but right-wingers have spent the last half-century acting as if SDS was synonymous with the Democratic Party. If we didn’t have Port Huron, would we have Chris Rufo?

Dear Dr. Anderson,
Thanks for your reply concerning the role of the PHS in reducing the Democratic Party’s tolerance for racists.

@Fake Dave “That lifestyle was premised on a whole freight of class assumptions (easy credit/affluent parents, low student debt, access to professional jobs without work experience, a stable housing market, etc.) that no longer apply”

I don’t know — the millennials I’m acquainted with who’ve been most likely to marry and have kids (and stick around) are the more working class and religious ones who somehow do this despite (or because of?) their lower-status and lower-paid jobs. The ones I know with affluent, high-educated parents have nearly all left (and not gotten very far on settling down even when they have good professional jobs in their adopted coastal cities). This category includes my own kids and nearly all of their high-school and university friends. Perhaps the church-going, blue-collar millennials who are sticking around and having kids are too dumb or deluded to realize the end of the planet is inevitable?

I do think you’re right that young people (especially the conscientious ones) may have been scared into thinking they should not procreate because the planet is doomed, but they should remember that this is the same kind of overactive conscientiousness that once approved of ZPG and the China one-child policy. Before unchecked climate change, it was ‘the population bomb’ that was going to kills us all. Or peak resources.
Or nuclear winter. Or some combination of soil erosion, acid rain, aquifer exhaustion, and over fishing. Not to say that none of these threats were real, but there is some good reason to suspect that muddling through will get us through.

If your political ‘tribe’ specializes in convincing its young members that the future is so dark that having children is irresponsible, isn’t that almost a guarantee of eventual failure (not least if the ‘other tribe’ is somewhat more resistant to such ideas)?

Could we be getting to the point where optimism for the future is a radical stance?