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.
“The civil rights, peace, and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm,” the Statement awkwardly asserts. “From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.”
Quite rightly, the Statement points out that “The university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes.” It is the “central institution for organizing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge.” The Statement asserts, “These social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change.”
“Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness,” the Statement says, “these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.”
The Statement then lays out its plan of action:
Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
Once liberated from its unfortunate prose style, this means something quite simple: The life of the mind, the intellect, and the intellectual class must be politicized. Intellectuals and academics should become political actors. They must use their intellectual skills and academic prestige to undertake political action and, presumably, institutionalize such action. That this ambition was realized in spectacular fashion can hardly be denied.
A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.
The entire plan for the takeover of the university was a form of “entryism,” the old communist tactic of infiltrating more moderate organizations. These organizations would then be conquered from within and their prestige used to further radical aims.
The Statement, however, advocates expanding this tactic of entryism to the entirety of society. Any “significant social role” that demands a university education or at least university certification should become a means of “distributing” radical leftists and their ideas. Given the previous section’s reference to “political life,” this would almost certainly involve the “distribution” of radical action.
A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
The defining aspect of the New Left, and the radical left today for that matter, is the dominance of young people. While the left’s leaders and bankrollers are often of more advanced age, its street commanders and foot soldiers are almost always in their early 20s at most. There is good reason for this: Adolescents and post-adolescents are, generally speaking, discontented and impulsive. They are riven by pent-up sexual energy that makes them prone to violence. They have less to lose than those who have already built a career and/or a family. And despite their pretensions otherwise, young people are remarkably deferential to authority. They are just out of the tightly regimented institutions of lower and higher education. They may rebel against that form of authority, but they are desperate for some kind of authority. They will happily look to professors and professional activists to be told what to do.
That SDS saw this and sought to harness it as early as 1962 showed remarkable insight and foresight. Its leaders knew, perhaps intuitively, that the first generation in history to grow up in relatively secure affluence and comfort would actually be more discontented than less privileged generations. Having avoided the struggles that have beset human beings for millennia, the privileged young would look for new struggles and inevitably find them. If these energies could be properly harnessed, the young would become a potent political force. Indeed, this may be why the New Left so intensely opposed the Vietnam War. They did not want the violent energies of youth to be expended through military service. They wanted those energies for themselves.
A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
On this point, SDS’s long-term success has been extraordinary. It is no exaggeration to say that almost all of the most controversial issues that beset American society—from race to gender to sexuality to “social justice”—have not just emerged from but have been generated by the universities. If it were not for radical academics toiling away in their seminar rooms, it is very unlikely that today’s “culture war” would exist. There would still be controversies and divisions (over race and economic inequality, for example) but the derangements of identity and gender politics, to name just two, would be relegated to the far corners of the dark web and Greenwich Village coffeehouses.
There is irony here too: While SDS’s heirs have proven to be geniuses at generating controversy, they have systematically annihilated the university as a “community of controversy.” Nothing is controversial in the academy anymore. Everyone knows what to think and, if they do not know it, they are either forced to think it or outright silenced. After all, the quickest way to resolve a controversy is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Within its own walls, on almost every issue of moment in American society, the university has not just pretended but made certain that no controversy exists. By valorizing the contentiousness of the academy, SDS helped obliterate it.
SDS’s ultimate ambition for its professoriate regime, the Statement implies, was to impose this regime on the entire nation and, it seems, the world. The Statement asserts:
We need not indulge in illusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. … The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
The SDS vision, in short, was to use the university as the center of a web of leftist groups, institutions, and constituencies. This consortium would not so much seize political power as simply become political power by sheer force of numbers.
This ambition was clearly global in scope, encompassing international allies who would presumably advocate and enact policies amenable to SDS. Given that the Statement asks elsewhere “And what of the revolutionary new peoples?” the international allies in question were almost certainly the various terrorist groups, revolutionary parties, and left-wing dictators of the emerging nations of the third world: In short, everyone the left would worship for the next 60 years—from Castro to Hamas.
It’s worth pointing out that this may be the professoriate regime’s only major failure. Despite its successful conquest and colonization of the university, it could not forge the international coalition necessary to extend its totalitarianism to the entire country and the world—at least not yet.
Certainly, from its base in the universities, the professoriate has fostered an activist industry that serves as one of the regime’s major enforcement arms. The professoriate has made serious inroads in government, major corporations, the media, and even the military. But it has not established dominance. It is stymied at every turn by a vibrant conservative movement and, in response to every excess, there has been a ferocious backlash.
We see this today in the disgust most Americans feel towards the professoriate’s genocidal antisemitism. As a result of this disgust, collaborationist administrators were hauled before Congress to answer some very uncomfortable questions. This helped force the president of Harvard to resign.
In other words, for the most part, the allies that SDS expected to find did not materialize. In many cases, such as the working class, they turned out to be bitter enemies.
On the international level, the situation is not appreciably different. For the most part, the professoriate’s international enforcement arm is the NGO industry. It is populated almost entirely by the regime’s minions and has adopted its most virulent ideologies, such as antisemitism and anti-Americanism. The NGO industry, moreover, largely runs the United Nations, whose unelected bureaucrats constitute something like SDS’s longed-for engineers of utopia.
Nonetheless, the nation-state remains the dominant form of world governance. Despite the UN’s pretensions, balance-of-power diplomacy and military power still dominate international affairs and will do so for the foreseeable future. The US may or may not be on the decline, but it is nonetheless a global hegemon. The professoriate should not prematurely celebrate the demise of a nation that has historically shown remarkable capacities for regeneration. Nor is the control economy likely to return to dominance anytime soon. Today’s Chinese communists, after all, may be the world’s most rapacious capitalists.
In the end, however, the Port Huron Statement is not overly concerned with the world as it is. In many ways, it is a statement of faith and its ultimate vision is a messianic one. The Statement describes this vision in a passage worthy of a revival meeting:
To turn these mythic possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum—research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.
SDS and the dictatorship of the professoriate to which it gave birth did not succeed in redeeming the world. Indeed, the world cannot be redeemed as they would understand it. Nonetheless, one cannot ignore that in its primary aims of imposing university “reform,” forging an alliance between radical students and faculty, coopting or terrorizing administrations, turning the university into a forum for incitement and demagogy, and above all, building “a base for their assault upon the loci of power,” SDS won an astounding victory.
This ought to give all Americans some pause. While they may or may not agree with some aspects of the professoriate’s ideology, it is highly unlikely that they would actually want to live under the regime the professoriate seeks to impose on them.
Many peoples are not particularly concerned about freedom and liberty, but Americans are not among them. Whatever else the professoriate may despise—and it despises a great many things—it despises freedom and liberty above all. Freedom, the professoriate knows, is death to any totalitarian regime. Wherever it can, the regime stamps it out in short order. But the United States is a nation built on freedom. As a result, it is very unlikely that the professoriate can achieve its ambitions in the absence of a full-scale civil war that it would almost certainly lose. It will run headlong into an immovable object and, whatever its high opinion of itself, the professoriate is not an unstoppable force. It will shatter.
Even so, one should not discount the regime’s power. In many ways, it remains America’s mind. Certainly, it is the manufacturing center for many of America’s leaders. It remains all but entirely unaccountable to anyone. As such, the professoriate is perfectly capable of causing immeasurable damage to American society. In any open confrontation, the professoriate would be defeated, but America could well emerge from the fight as a second-rate power.
If Americans wish to avoid such a catastrophe, and they should, they must begin the process of rolling back the achievements of the Port Huron Conspiracy. They must inform the professoriate that the university does not exist in a vacuum. It is an institution with social responsibilities. Among them is the obligation to enrich American society, not destroy it. Should the professoriate refuse to fulfill this obligation—and it will refuse—then the process of smashing it must begin.
Numerous practical measures can accomplish this: Taking the power of hiring and firing out of the hands of existing faculty and administration, banning protester-terrorism on campus, enforcing existing codes of conduct, holding the professoriate and its minions accountable for their criminal behavior, revoking the tenure of professors who use their platform to push racist and/or genocidal ideologies, and cracking down on all attempts to silence dissenting speech and assembly.
None of this can be done, however, without understanding where the dictatorship of the professoriate came from. Where it came from is a brief, woolly, demagogic, and quite sinister document that outlined a roadmap to totalitarianism that has been followed to the smallest detail. In a fit of absence of mind, America allowed this plan to succeed. Thus, it finds itself at a fateful impasse.
This predicament is not new. All republics face the perennial threat of tyranny. But the United States has a long and proud history of overcoming such threats. Now it must understand that the professoriate may be a paper tyrant, but it is a tyrant all the same. And like all tyrants, it too must be overcome if the republic is to survive.
Sixties radical Bill Ayers visits pro-Hamas encampment.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/obama-connected-professor-who-led-radical-group-that-bombed-us-speaks-anti-israel-encampment.amp
Follow the money: These leftist agitators are funded by Qatar, Iran, CCP, Rockefeller Foundation and other bad actors.