The Port Huron Conspiracy
Six decades ago, the plan for the radical left’s successful conquest of the universities was drawn up. It has been followed down to the smallest detail.
To many Americans, the takeover of their universities by the radical left seems to have come out of nowhere. This is very much not the case, but even those who were well aware of the problem beforehand likely assumed that this particular form of totalitarianism took shape through a strange law of attraction: Since most academics and administrators are leftists, the universities naturally became institutionally leftist. Combine this with young people’s well-known propensity for onanistic radicalism and America’s current impasse was inevitable.
There is some truth in this. Certainly, academia is an uncomfortable place for anyone who is not a leftist because most academics are leftists. A kind of “natural selection” does occur. As a result, the universities have become a self-selecting group. Liberals and conservatives do not just find it difficult to join academia, they increasingly—if only out of pure disgust—no longer want to.
This is a peripheral phenomenon, however. The professoriate regime did not rise to power as a result of undirected forces. It did so through a conscious conspiracy undertaken six decades ago by student radicals. They systematically targeted the university for conquest and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The results are now before us: Today, the dictatorship of the professoriate that rules academia is a racist, antisemitic, genocidal, and totalitarian institution. It suppresses any free speech and assembly of which it disapproves. It uses physical violence to enforce its dictates. It engages in blatantly unethical and often criminal behavior. It is populating the American ruling class with self-hating, censorious, and nihilistic incompetents whose conduct threatens the future of the United States itself. It guzzles taxpayer funds and gauged tuition costs while demonizing those who pay the bills as privileged oppressors. It acts outside of any laws, professional ethics, or basic standards of common decency. It is never held accountable for anything.
In other words, the university has become a cancer on the American soul. If it is not cured, it will prove fatal.
No disease can be cured without understanding its cause. Thankfully, in the case of the professoriate regime, the cause is not difficult to find. We know who conquered the universities and how it was done. We know this because the conquerors happily confessed to the crime before they even committed it.
When asked how history would judge him, Winston Churchill once famously said, “Favorably, because I intend to write it.” He then quite brilliantly did so. So did the 1960s New Left.
Indeed, no political movement has benefited so much from writing its own history since the “Lost Cause” historians temporarily “redeemed” the Confederacy. Many today remember the New Left as a peaceful, idealistic movement dedicated to freedom and justice. The reason is that the survivors of the New Left wrote its history and silenced anyone who might dissent from it.
In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, most people knew that the New Left was quite adept at rioting, terrorism, demagoguery, and at times outright subversion. But time passes and memories fade. Eventually, the past is contained only in books. Those who write the books, especially if they can burn the other books, will define that past.
With the possible exception of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, no New Left organization has been the subject of more intense hagiography than Students for a Democratic Society.
As its name suggests, SDS was composed of and led by college students. It emerged out of the remains of the “old left” and would come to be seen as ground zero for the New Left. Until it blew to fragments in the early 1970s under the pressure of its own radicalism—spinning off various terrorist groups like the Weather Underground—SDS was the primary force behind 1960s student radicalism, especially the mass movement in favor of a communist victory in Vietnam.
In 1962, the then-nascent SDS issued its manifesto: The Port Huron Statement. It was primarily written by Tom Hayden. Hayden would later become famous as one of the “Chicago Seven,” a group of left-wing activists prosecuted for inciting the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were all breathtakingly guilty but were eventually liberated by an appeals court, which grumbled over such things as the failure to properly question potential jurors as to whether they disliked hippies. This, along with his later marriage to Jane Fonda, made Hayden a folk hero on the left. He went on to a semi-successful political career and his obituaries would contain favorable notices from mainstream figures like Bill Clinton.
The manifesto Hayden penned, however, is not particularly impressive. For the most part, it is a rambling screed that expends a startling number of words on the topic of how horrible it was to be a privileged middle-class college student in 1960s America. Its dystopian rantings are too long to recount here. Suffice it to say that, had the US actually been the hellscape the manifesto describes, 1960s Canada would have enjoyed much higher rates of immigration than it did.
The Statement is also notably short on actual policy proposals. This was likely intentional. It is quite possible, of course, that the leaders of SDS had no idea what they actually wanted to do. But one of the great advantages of the New Left—and the left today—was a studious ambiguity about its ultimate ambitions. The more you stick to general declamations and demagogic condemnations, the more difficult it is to criticize you. If you say you want a minimum tax rate of 75%, for example, the arguments against are obvious. If you say you want “social justice,” the argument becomes much harder. Everyone, after all, wants “social justice.” No one wants to be seen as opposing it. Such vagueness is a cheap tactic but it works, especially in a society as post-literate as our own.
On one point, however, the Statement is quite specific: To achieve power, the left must take over the university system and transform it into a base for radical political action.
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