The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives

13 Rhetorics of Resistance: The Port Huron Project

When I started teaching at Brown University in 2005, I was surprised by how little antiwar protest there was on campus. Brown has a long history of student activism: the eruptions of 1968 culminated in Brown’s adoption of progressive new curriculum drafted by students, and in 1985 students erected shanties and staged hunger strikes to protest the university’s investments in companies doing business in South Africa. It was clear that my students objected to American involvement in Iraq and the Bush administration’s disregard for civil liberties, but they seemed to believe that resistance was futile. It is not hard to imagine why. In 2000 they witnessed a presidential election that many believed had been stolen. In 2003 many students participated in the largest antiwar protests in history (the BBC estimated that six to ten million people in sixty countries protested the imminent invasion of Iraq on February 15 and 16 of that year), but the Bush and Blair administrations were undeterred.1 In 2004 many students worked on John Kerry’s presidential campaign only to see George W. Bush reelected by a narrow margin amid accusations of voting fraud. Their formative political experiences had left them demotivated, if not cynical. The absence of contemporary youth-led protest movements in the United States is often attributed to the absence of a military draft, to economic uncertainty , or to the rise of the Internet as an alternative to face-to-face interaction . But it seems to me that this absence is symptomatic of larger political, cultural, and intellectual dynamics as well. Slavoj Žižek argues that “things look bad for great Causes today, in a ‘postmodern’ era when, although the ideological scene is fragmented into a panoply of positions which struggle for hegemony, there is an underlying consensus: the era of big explanations is CHAPTER THIRTEEN Rhetorics of Resistance The Port Huron Project MARK TRIBE Rhetorics of Resistance 357 over . . . ; in politics too, we should no longer aim at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects.”2 The collapse of the Soviet Union, the widespread abandonment of socialism , the relentless advance of neoliberalism, and the rise of capitalism in Communist Asia have created a situation in which it has become difficult to sustain sweeping radical agendas. Revolution seems impossible, at least for now. Within the ranks of the Far Left, all but a few have abandoned what Alain Badiou calls the “communist hypothesis,” or the theory that a “different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor . . . [that] the existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: [that] a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.”3 It appears that we have entered an era in which reform and tactical resistance define the horizon of possibility. Although some students do stage small protests focused on specific issues such as racial profiling by campus security and divestment from companies involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, many more are engaged in public service . If you can’t start a revolution, the logic goes, change the world by helping one person at a time. For these students, the “massive social movement” that Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) president Paul Potter called for in his 1965 speech “We Must Name the System” is practically inconceivable (figure 13.2).4 Yet the legacy of the New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s continues to inform the ways in which radical politics is imagined and practiced. In 2006 Figure 13.1. “Until the Last Gun Is Silent: Coretta Scott King 1968/2006.” Central Park, New York City, September 16, 2006. Photo: Winona Barton-Ballentine. 358 MARK TRIBE students at dozens of campuses around the country formed a new national organization named after Students for a Democratic Society, the radical student group that was founded in 1960 and grew into the largest student activist movement in U.S. history before dissolving in 1969. The original SDS had fraught relationships with Old Left organizations such as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and represented a generation that united behind the saying, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” That the new SDS looked to their parents’ peers for inspiration is a telling irony. In The Port Huron Project I sought to engage the legacy of the...