Between Radicalism & Revolution: The Cautionary Tale of Students For a Democratic Society

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” –Bob Dylan

I started writing this post last August while reading Mark Rudd’s Underground, an autobiographical history of his rise through the leadership ranks of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the late 60s and his subsequent co-founding of the revolutionary domestic terrorist organization The Weathermen. But my thoughts were not quite in line yet, so I saved my notes for another day. I picked it up again a few months ago when my colleague Barbara Sostaita wrote a thought-provoking piece on the Black Panthers, a group I have always admired. I am finishing it now as I see many of my friends and colleagues engaging with ideas on the fringe of the libertarian framework, too often with animosity toward their peers, attempting to define each other out of the libertarian camp. While I find all of these topics fascinating, I think the history of SDS can tell us something about the trajectory of our own dialogue and the movement at large.

The topic is radicalism and revolutionary thinking in social change. I want to differentiate between radicalism, which is essential to our cause, and revolutionary thinking, which has historically isolated and undermined mass movements.

Radicalism is the key component to a vibrant and growing movement. As Rudd observed in his book, “‘Radical,’ meant getting at the root of things.” He must have studied his latin. To be radical means to question the surface layers of our world, to look deeper, to find the underlying causes of societal problems. It means to focus on idealism and have concern for issues of justice, freedom, peace, and prosperity. These are the issues that are truly motivating, especially for passionate young people.

Radicalism has been key to the growth of SFL and the student movement for liberty. Yes, we are concerned with public policy and the application of our ideas, but debates over lowering the marginal tax rates are not what get us out of bed in the morning. The fight for human freedom does that.

Revolutionary thinking goes a step further than radicalism by assuming the entire structure of society or a movement is corrupt and that it has to be torn down and started fresh. It posits that revolutionaries know what is best for all and that they can rationally design something better. In practice, it leads to massive upheaval and destruction, as can be seen from the blood-soaked streets of the French Revolution to the bomb-shattered legacy of Students for a Democratic Society.

The Story

The tension between radical and revolutionary thinking clearly expressed itself within Students For a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Rudd describes his journey through SDS as a radical one. What drew him and his peers was idealism expressed through fights for civil rights, participatory democracy, and peace:

It was the idealism of the writers of the Port Huron Statement that pulled me in: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.” The “participatory democracy” they proposed would allow each individual citizen to make the decisions affecting his or her life. Plus, the Port Huron Statement gave students an important role in the development of the “New Left” in this country, as the visionaries and activists for the new society.

Sign me up!

Within months, Rudd went from interested member to the leader of a campus-wide strike at Columbia University to protest racist practices of the university. He then organized mass demonstrations around New York City to protest against the university’s military research and contracting.  He quickly ascended the ranks of SDS’s local and national leadership while attracting many new students to the cause. He was radical to the core.

Idealism captured Rudd, and engaging with new challenging ideas and world developments deepened his commitment. Along the way he and his friends in the leadership continued to engage in more fringe ideas, revolutionary ideas:

 After ICV [a single issue anti war group] meetings, people would go hang out at the West End Bar on Broadway or to an upperclassman’s apartment. Over beers or a joint, I’d listen to discussions about China’s Cultural Revolution, then just starting, and to Cuba’s seven-year-old revolution. It was thrilling to be with these people who were tapping into something so much bigger than ourselves—something so grand, so historic: remaking the world.

They called themselves the Action Faction, and although they recognized that their movement was growing, they lost patience with just fighting for peace and democracy. More dramatic steps would be necessary, violent steps. They started hanging around with the Black Panthers and similar groups that were already taking up arms in the fight for liberation. They journeyed beyond ideas that were radical and went down a rabbit hole of revolutionary ideologies. To Rudd and his friends in the Action Forum, a revolutionary strategy needed a revolutionary ideology: “They all agreed on one solution, Marxist revolution.”

However, not everyone in the broad coalition of SDS agreed with this sentiment. Some like Rudd endorsed a Marxist-Leninist strategy. The well-organized Progressive Labor Party (PLP) favored a Maoist approach. Other preferred raw communal anarchism and a whole host of liberation based ideologies. These camps entrenched themselves and become more concerned with defeating each other to gain control over the movement, rather than growing the movement from the bottom up.

Years of infighting came to a head at the 1969 SDS Convention in Chicago. In a showdown between the Marxist-Leninist National Office (Rudd’s faction had gained control of the office) and the PLP, the National Office drove the Maoists out of SDS. Even more insane, they then closed the office they had acquired and dissolved the infrastructure of SDS in order to found The Weather Underground. They had decided that holding anti-war rallies and mass organizing for SDS was not enough. They were off to start a Marxist revolution against the rich and powerful in the US, and the rest of SDS could follow them or be left behind.

The rest of the story is the sad death of SDS. The founders of the Weathermen including Rudd, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, and others went underground. They organized violent riots and bombed empty government buildings. Then, on March 6, 1970 Weathermen Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold accidentally detonated a pipe bomb in their Greenwich Village

townhouse, killing themselves and destroying and positivity that remained for their movement.

While all this was going on, SDS chapters around the country could only look on in befuddlement. The vast majority of SDSers were radicals who wanted to fight against war in Vietnam and for peace at home. So, why was their organization taken over by violent revolutionaries from the inside? There was an extreme disconnect between the grassroots and the leadership cadre who become more concerned with Marxism than their original causes of peace and democracy.

As Rudd describes:

Much of what the Weathermen did had the opposite effect of what we intended. We deorganized SDS while we claimed we were making it stronger; we isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence….This is not a heroic story; if anything, it’s antiheroic.

The SDS leadership had abandoned their radical ideas with broad appeal for extreme revolutionary obsession, and their historic movement died for it.

The Implications

I tell this story now because I see similarly worrying trends in the student movement for liberty. We have grown very rapidly through a combination of youth discontent with the status quo and radical ideas with mass appeal. Fourteen years of the Bush-Obama continuum have proven the inefficiency and corruption of big government corporatism. By championing lofty ideas of liberty while pushing principled concepts like civil liberties, fiscal restraint, and restrained foreign policy, the student movement for liberty has become a dominant force on the campuses around the world.

With that growth has come similar discord. There have always been many “types” of libertarians because there are many justifications

for libertarianism. Combine that diversity with our instinctive individualism and, naturally, we have our own internal camps. But since our founding, Students For Liberty has always embraced a big tent approach. We understand that it is okay to have different foundations and applications of the ideas, but remain united in the principles of liberty.

But what I see now is a revolutionary mindset among our leaders. Some view libertarianism as it has historically been as insufficient, arguing that we need something more revolutionary. Some argue that “real” libertarianism or an improved libertarianism must also include anarchism, or progressivism, or critical race theory, or any number of perspectives. They attempt to redefine the term to fit their camp’s priorities. The lines of thinking between what’s happening now and what precipitated SDS’s downfall are shockingly similar, “sure, what got us this far is all well and good, but if we are really going to make a difference, we need something else.”

For SDS leaders, it was that democracy is not enough; what they really needed was revolutionary Marxism. For us today, it often seems that libertarianism is not enough; what we really need is left-anarchism or thick libertarianism or non-brutalist libertarianism or any number of camps out there.

The problem with these niche topics is that while they are interesting and should be explored, they are not what brought us to libertarianism in the first place. After we have been around the movement for a while, it is easy to forget where we came from. Most of us came into the movement through Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, the Libertarian Party, Frédéric Bastiat, or another introductory source.

If a college freshman were to stumble upon the SFL website lately, they would see mostly infighting and critiques of libertarianism and very little dialogue on how damn great libertarianism is. Being self-critical is fantastic, and I am glad we encourage reflective thinking. But, when we gets too far down that rabbit hole, we lose sight of the bigger picture. We must remember to practice humility regarding our tradition. Our real enemies are not from within. Our purpose is to grow our movement, not divide it.

A Call for Peace & Moving Forward

I do not think our problems are nearly as severe as those that killed SDS, but it is close enough for discomfort. I myself have been guilty of this and have probably spent far too many words trying to write conservative libertarians or Objectivists out of the libertarian camp. Years of fighting these battles have convinced me that I am in no position to redefine what libertarianism is. We are the inheritors of a centuries-old liberal tradition, and I will be lucky to make some small contribution to its popularization.

It is important to remember that we are winning! The seeds that our predecessors laid are now bearing fruit. New outlets around the country have realized the libertarian trends of our generation. From The Washington Post to The New York Times to Politico, the list goes on and on of outlets covering our libertarian moment. What we have been doing is working. The radical libertarian message has broad appeal. We don’t need anything revolutionary or new. We need Rand, Rothbard, and Bastiat. We need more popularizers like Ron Paul. Yes, we should strive to do better, but we can do so without pointing fingers and blaming each other for libertarianism’s weak points (yes, we have them, all ideologies do).

There has been far too much “we would be better off if” and “this is why we can’t have nice things” rhetoric in the movement. Internal debates are healthy and good. We should study fringe ideas and be critical of our own beliefs, but not to the point where we devolve into tribal elitism over those differences.

The leaders of SDS went too far down their own ideological rabbit hole. They became obsessed over the 5% that divided them. They tried to prove that they were more hardcore, more revolutionary than their opponents. In the end, their narrow-minded bravado destroyed them.

We inhabit a powerful place between radicalism and revolution. We are radical to the core, peeling back the layers of society to find the root problems. We carry on a centuries old liberal tradition applied to the modern world. We seek to smash the status quo and enlighten our peers. Our idealism is our strength and our motivation to make a better world. And our message has power — social freedom, economic freedom, academic freedom, restrained foreign policy. Reading and teaching the foundations of libertarianism is popular. We don’t need anything more revolutionary than what came before. Our message is working, and we need to hit it over and over and over again. These might not be the most interesting topics for us who have already studied them, but they are what attract new students to the cause. We need to be radical champions and unifiers, not dividers, of liberty.