by Michael Kazin

Over on The Spine, Marty Peretz praises a critique, just published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, of the attempted revival of Students for a Democratic Society. The author of the article is Maurice Isserman--my friend, sometime co-author, and fellow erstwhile SDS member (almost 40 years ago!). Because Maurice warns, sensibly, against the impulse to repeat the self-destructive antics young radicals like us indulged in during the late 1960s, some bloggers have, predictably, accused him of opposing the very idea of a new New Left. However, the fact that SDS is struggling to re-emerge at all raises a larger question: What kind of politics do contemporary students engage in, if they view themselves as political activists at all? Since 2004, most polls have reported that undergrads incline more to liberal views and Democratic candidates than does the population as a whole. And there are certainly more young bloggers who lean left than right. Perhaps Barack Obama will be able to translate such views and cyber-energies into an army of young campaigners. But activists who don't focus on electoral politics--or, as in the late '60s and early '70s, flip off the major parties altogether--seem far less numerous. At Georgetown, where I teach, pleasant spring and fall mornings bring out a dozen or so tables on the bricked-in quad (known as "Red Square" for its color, not the shading of its politics). Small knots of students promote pro-choice and pro-life and a living wage, recruit for various ethnic and race-based clubs, and sing the virtues of tutoring homeless children or teaching in an inner-city school. Hardly anyone on campus still defends the war in Iraq; even a student of mine who once interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib thinks the invasion was a stupid mistake. Still, it's been months since I saw or heard a single undergrad seek to channel that sentiment into protest. If anyone is trying to organize a local SDS chapter, they must be doing it exclusively on line. It's possible that a campus in D.C. where both George Tenet and Madeleine Albright are faculty members and where Bill Clinton gives a speech every semester or so isn't the best place to find a groundswell of independent activism. Or maybe "the student movement" has become mostly a subject for historical study, a phenomenon that crested decades ago and survives more as a desire of the left--young and old--than as a prospect for the future. I hope not, but then I'm old enough to remember when Marty Peretz was a radical, and my teacher.