Historical look at a pivotal point in the advance of communism in the USA. Just think - a concerted round of mockery and ridicule (or a low-yield tactical nuke) could have resulted in quite a different outcome. From Chris Queen writing at PJ Media:
60 Years Ago This Week: the Birth of the New Left
In June 1962, the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a retreat in Port Huron, Mich. The powerful United Auto Workers (UAW) union owned the facility where the retreat took place and bankrolled the retreat itself.
The SDS had grown dissatisfied with the establishment left and sought to usher in what they called “participatory democracy” characterized by action rather than debate. On Friday, June 15, the SDS issued a manifesto that clocked in at a whopping 25,700 words and came to be known as the Port Huron Statement.
Tom Hayden, a core SDS member, wrote the first draft of the statement.
Despite its immense length, the statement laid out what the SDS saw as the primary problems with the U.S. in the early paragraphs.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people–these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
The statement decried politicians who insisted that the U.S. would “muddle through” in its current state and claimed to represent a generation “imbued with energy” to dramatically change the world through non-violent civil disobedience and persistent activism. Dr. Albert Mohler calls the Port Huron Statement “one of the most important political events of the 20th century. But frankly, it wasn’t recognized as such at the time.” It was the birth of what we now call the New Left.
If a New Left emerged in 1962, that means there had to be an Old Left. The Old Left was dynastic — think Roosevelts and Kennedys — and aristocratic. More importantly, it was anti-communist.
Their hearts were in the right place but they did not study their history and they allowed themselves to be corrupted from within. Their enemy was not conservatism, it was the nascent deep-state. Over the intervening 60 years, instead of Questioning Authority, they morphed into Authority. They became their enemy - The Man. Now? They seek to keep us down.
