Last Thursday Brad de Long (Berkeley) published a piece (here) on the (1962) Port Huron Statement (hereafter: PHS). (Somewhat sadly a good chunk of his piece is behind a paywall, so I can’t engage in a debate with him) The following day I modestly rewrote and published a piece on Arnold Kaufman at Crooked Timber, which coincidentally closed with a new final paragraph on the Port Huron Statement. Qua blogger, I deny coincidence, so I decided to spend a bit of the week-end re-rereading the PHS.
The PHS is ascribed to notes by Tom Hayden, who then led Students for a Democratic Society. I don’t think it is injustice to Hayden or Sandra Cason Hayden to acknowledge also the influence of Arnold S. Kaufman (then at University of Michigan) on the PHS not the least its embrace of participatory democracy and (via Dewey) experiments in living (a phrase used in the PHS).
Now PHS (here) was published over 62 years ago. Some of its gendered rhetoric dates it, in fact. It also has a strain of techno-optimism — it embraces nuclear power to fuel cities (p3. all my page numbers are to the 1964 edition published by Students for a Democratic Society in New York) and promotes machine labor to generate leisure for workers (p. 20)— that is absent now on much of the left. As is the then concern with overpopulation.
But it is still uncanny how many of its tropes are still part of today’s left criticism of the status quo. Here’s a sampling of what I noticed: first, the authors claim theirs is “the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide cataclysm.” (p. 17) What the PHS statement means is not environmental collapse (which our students worry about), but rather the shadow of mutually assured destruction. Second, the authors of PHS complain “that the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present.” (p. 4) I hear this often from many of my students, who often have read and admired Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). Third, universities are being transformed (for the worse) by “the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness of 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 to the value standards of business and administrative mentality within the university.” (p. 10) And later “"we must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy.” (p. 63) This made me wonder why today we look back on this era as a golden age of higher education. Fourth, “the wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock.” (p. 15) Fifth, “military defense is the main item of "public" spending and obvious oligopoly.” (15) Sixth, “a poverty of vision, and a poverty of political action to make that vision reality.” (p. 23)
While I am interested in the fact that the fears, diagnoses, and tropes of that age’s student movement can be so effortlessly re-activated today (and for most of my adult life), that’s not my present topic.
Okay, so much for set up.
A section early in the manifesto, is titled “Politics Without Publics.” (p.12) It would be worth checking how many scholarly works of the last few decades in ‘deliberative democracy’ or the role of ‘publics in democratic life’ acknowledge PHS in their self-presentation. Some other time more on Kaufman and his vision of participatory democracy. Anyway, the section starts as follows:
Now, one way in which the authors of PHS propose to un-frustrate, un-paralyze, and un-confuse citizens and democracy at large is by promoting what we would now call the sorting of the parties into polarized coalitions on each side: “two parties presenting distinctive and significant differences of approach.” (p. 12) They propose throwing the Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats out of the Democratic party (p. 12 & 55) and a realignment of the parties, including the exclusion of “the “leftist” elements of the national GOP” (p. 14) and, second, to undo “the seniority system of Congress.” (p. 12) Third, they also deplore that the system of “organized political stalemate,” (p. 13) also prevents discussion of “national and international issues.” (p. 13) What is needed is “two genuine partes, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles.” (p. 46) This would be a major step to “true democracy.” (p. 48) By implication the states quo of its day is a false democracy.
Whether it is LBJ’s passing of the civil rights act of 1964, which addressed their concern with disenfranchisement of minority voters, or the Southern Strategy of Goldwater and Nixon, the first of these objectives has been achieved. The second of these objectives has not been achieved. However, after his landslide victory in 1994, that child of the 1960s, Newt Gingrich, did make progress in partially abolishing the seniority system (especially on the Republican side). He did so by successfully nationalizing the House election. In many ways, Gingrich is, in fact, the political architect of present politics with two distinctly opposed political parties who offer a clear alternative choice (and where the politicians also not infrequently dislike each other.) {This strikes me as a reversal to the mean, but for many it’s been a rude shock} What PHS wanted was “sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues” (p. 46), and that’s what it got since the 1990s.
As an aside, I don’t mean to suggest that after the Contract with America the rise of Bonepartism within the Republican party was inevitable. But with open primaries it was also not so easily preventable. (Anyway, that’s all covered in my digressions of 2015.)
Anyway, it’s pretty clear what the PHS expects from a polarized politics by looking at its diagnoses of the then unpolarized present:
So, from the fact that voters will be offered a clear alternative in a polarized environment, the PHS authors also expect more engaged voters. This seems prescient. However, the expectation that this clarity of alternatives will generate a more rational manner of policy discussion seems naive. See also, their claim that “it would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues of the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between persons of every opinion—on television, on platforms, and through other media.” (p. 31; I like how the meaning change of ‘platform’ since then is irrelevant for here.) And it presupposes an idealized conception of the demos and responsible elites, who when they propose decisive solutions to the voter’s mundane problems, will only propose them in public spirited fashion. For the PHS “democracy…requires every effort to set in peaceful opposition the basic viewpoints of the day.” (p. 31) As an aspiration this is noble, as a descriptive feature it is clearly the Achilles heel of the program.
As an aside, and as regular readers know, inspired by Walter Lippmann’s vision in the Good Society, I don’t think liberals should be paralyzed by fear that the other party is evidently illiberal and committed to a zero-sum politics. Some fear is healthy, however, if it promotes organising and rethinking. Unlike other liberals, I also don’t think a zero-sum program is irrational for those that vote for it since they expect to do well enough under it.
Be that as it may, the authors of PHS were not wholly oblivious to the true dangers of increased party differentiation. For, above I partially quoted a sentence, “sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues;” this sentence continues “yet sufficient party overlap to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.” (p. 46) Unfortunately, they don’t spell this out. But it shows evidence that the authors of PHS at least recognized that (to rephrase) there needed to be sufficient attachment to the rules of constitutional government that a change of administration wouldn’t itself be a cause of instability and paralysis. I have been unable to find a suggestion how they might secure this party overlap in PHS.