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Port Huron and the War On Terror
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2002


Forty years ago, I wrote a book about the New Left, which was in fact the
first book about the New Left and a kind of manifesto of what it intended.
In the same year, a much more famous document appeared, called "The Port
Huron Statement," which was the founding manifesto of the Students for A
Democratic Society. This was an organization that began by agitating for
"participatory democracy," became the largest organization of the left and
ended up, a bare seven years later, calling for war against "Amerikkka" and
creating the Weather Underground - the first terrorist political cult. As it
happens, the most famous of the two principal authors of the Port Huron
Statement, Tom Hayden, was one of the loudest voices calling for a "war of
liberation" in Amerikka and formed his own little guerrilla army to achieve
that goal. 

Not surprisingly, Hayden does not care to remember or explain this political
devolution, even though it was actually predicted at the time by dissenters
from Port Huron, notably the late Irving Howe. Even in 1962, Howe understood
that Hayden and his comrades were totalitarians in the making. Now, Hayden
and his co-author Dick Flacks have written a feature story for the August
5th issue of The Nation, called "The Port Huron Statement at 40," in which
they celebrate its longevity and influence as though the seeds of
malevolence they sowed (and the rest of the nation reaped) were something to
be proud of.

The picture the two activists paint - rosy by even the most generous
standards - is made possible by a selective forgetting of the kind Milan
Kundera has explored in his writings on the totalitarian delusion. Thus
Hayden describes himself in those early days as a "a Midwestern populist by
nature, rebelling apolitically against the boring hypocrisy of suburban life
- until the Southern black student sit-in movement showed him that a
committed life was possible." This is the purest eyewash, which any
reasonable reader can detect by asking how this description can explain the
fact that Hayden found himself in the leadership of a socialist organization
(SDS was an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy) surrounded by
Marxists like his co-author, Dick Flacks, whose members were
self-consciously working out the problems they had inherited -- as
socialists -- from Stalinism. The key battle at Port Huron (not even
addressed in the Hayden-Flacks nostalgia piece) was whether to include
actual members of the Communist Party in the coalition that would become
SDS.

At Port Huron, Hayden went head to head with Irving Howe's ideological
soul-mate, Michael Harrington, over this very issue, an episode notably
omitted from the Hayden-Flacks' account. Instead, the debate is presented
this way: "While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong
denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like
Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the
United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race...In truth, they
seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student
activism..." Denouncing abuses of power in the Soviet Union in 1962 was easy
for leftists. The head of the Soviet Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev had
denounced Stalin's crimes and one-man rule. What Howe and Harrington felt
threatened by, in fact, was the lack of absolute clarity on the part of
Hayden and his friends in condemning Communist totalitarianism as such, in
distancing themselves from supporters of Communism and in making clear what
their position was in the Cold War - the great moral struggle of the latter
half of the 20th Century. Which side were they were against?


To be fair, Hayden and Flacks do quote a critic or two, one of whom happens
to be me. "The former radical David Horowitz reads the [Port Huron]
statement as encoding a 'self-conscious effort to rescue the Communist
project from its Soviet fate.'" This is a quote from my autobiography
Radical Son, a book  in which I recall that those of us who created the New
Left were trying to throw out the Stalinist bathwater but not the socialist
baby itself. Radical Son is an account of how the continuing commitment to a
socialist agenda and the unwillingness to be identified with the
anti-Communist cause led to the New Left's embrace of totalitarian agendas
and totalitarian causes, in particular the wars of Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot.
Tom Hayden is one of the few New Leftists who ever gave moment's thought to
the millions of peasants in Southeast Asia he helped to slaughter by backing
the Communists in their wars. Unfortunately, Hayden's moment of clarity -
which he records in his own memoir Reunion - was half-hearted and brief, and
he seems to have forgotten it altogether at this point in his life (lately,
he has embraced the IRA).

Reading Hayden and Flacks, one would never know that these issues -
momentous as they are -even exist. In their account, the New Left was born
not out of the collapse of the Old Left, but out of a generalized apathy of
the Fifties generation and its obliviousness to the possibility that any
social problems might exist (elitist arrogance and contempt for ideological
inferiors is the left's hallmark). Thus, "on some campuses, professors and
students were questioning the Cold War arms race" - as though others had
failed to notice it or were too stupid to give it any thought. "There were
stirrings on the fringe, too, where students were listing to Bob Dylan and
rock and roll. SDS represented the first defections from the mainstream."

In fact, SDS didn't represent defections from anything, nor were its members
"mainstream." Defections from the mainstream happened later, as a result of
the military draft, when college students reluctant to risk their lives in
battle came scurrying into its ranks. In 1962, SDS was pretty much a
collection of red diaper babies and political fellow travelers trying to
jumpstart a left whose collusion with Communism had brought it into
disrepute and decimated its ranks. That's why the pivotal concept of the
manifesto they adopted - and the idea that Hayden and Flacks are most eager
to celebrate -- is "participatory democracy" (because it promised freedom
from the stigma). 

"Participatory democracy sought to expand the sphere of public decisions
from the mere election of representatives to the deeper role of 'bringing
people out of isolation and into community' in decentralized forms of
decision-making. The same democratic humanism was applied to the economy in
calls for 'incentives worthier than money,' and for work to be
'self-directed, not manipulated.'" 

Who do Hayden and Flacks think they're fooling at this late date? Anyone
even faintly familiar with the history of the left will instantly recognize
these ideas as quintessential communist doctrines. (Indeed, what economy do
the authors have in mind based on "incentives worthier than money" - Cuba?)
Workers Councils to the anarchists, "Soviets" to the Russians - these are
other names for "participatory democracy." But the idea is the same: the
political enforcement of an equality of condition, the destruction of due
process and all hierarchies - professional, scientific, meritocratic,
traditional -- in the name of "social justice," which is itself another name
for totalitarian rule. The never changing leftist idea of social justice is
that the state should act as if it were God, arranging a perfectly ordered
world, or at least one that conforms to the prejudices of the left. 

"It was no wonder, then, that the [Port Huron] statement was inspired by
participatory democracy. Participation is what we were denied, and what we
hungered for. Without it, there was no dignity. Parents and professors
lectured us, administrators ordered us, draft boards conscripted us, the
whole system channeled us, all to please authority and take our place in
line." What must it be like to have lived as long as Hayden and Flacks and
to have learned so little? Still no appreciation of all that parents and
professors and authority have brought them. Leftists like Hayden and Flacks
remind me of the punch-line to one of those jokes told on the edge of
puberty: "I want what I want when I want it!" All the self-absorbed and
destructive egotism of a five-year-old embedded in the truly destructive
personae of adults.

So it is no accident, as we used to say, that this old pair of
unreconstructed communists should have no wiser view of the challenges we
face as a nation forty years later. Or that they should take pleasure in
their present influence in encouraging the most destructive elements in our
culture - the hate-America, corporation-phobic gremlins of the newest left.
"There is a new movement astir in the world, against the inherent violence
of globalization, corporate rule and fundamentalism, that reminds us
strongly of the early 1960s....The war on terrorism has revived the cold war
framework. An escalating national security state attempts to rivet our
attention and invest our resources on fighting an elusive, undefined enemy
for years to come, at the inevitable price of our civil liberties and
continued neglect of social justice. To challenge the framework of the war
on terrorism, to demand a search for real peace with justice, is as
difficult today as challenging the cold war was at Port Huron." 

Here is a priceless confession. What was difficult for Hayden, Flacks and
the New Left about "challenging the cold war," was that the war they were
challenging - America's war - was a war on behalf of human freedom. One and
half billion people liberated from the chains of the Soviet imperialism
testify to that. What is difficult for Hayden, Flacks and the new New Left
about challenging the war on terror is really the same -- that their country
is right and that they hate it nonetheless. What is interesting is that
Hayden and Flacks, and the editors of the Nation would be so forthright in
declaring their intention to weaken and undermine America's war against
terror, and to use "civil liberties" and "social justice" as the instruments
for accomplishing it. Let's hope the American people are taking note, and
will mount an appropriate response. 


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David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography,
Radical Son, which has been described as "the first great autobiography of
his generation," and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to
the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of
Bad Faith, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes and The Art of
Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House
political strategist Karl Rove as "the perfect guide to winning on the
political battlefield." Horowitz's latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published
in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and
racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring. Click here to read more
about David