In 1961, as a beginning graduate student in political theory at the University of Michigan, I enrolled in a philosophy seminar taught by Arnold Kaufman entitled (I think) “Democracy and Participation.” Tom Hayden was also in that seminar. He was already a major figure in student politics at the university. What a class it was, and it played a major role in the Port Huron Statement published a year later. The older political science grad students in the class resisted Kaufman’s theme about the positive role of participation, wedded as they were to realism, the iron law of oligarchy, and Madisonianism. But I bought it hook, line, and sinker, trying to forge a broad image of the idea to encompass worker participation, demonstrations to support Civil Rights, and, soon, participation in a nationwide antiwar movement.

In the spring of 1964, Kaufman was a leader in creating the first anti–Vietnam War teach-in in the country. It was altered from a planned all-day event after Governor George Romney threatened to fire professors who used classrooms for a political event during teaching hours. That governor had a narrow definition of teaching. Instead of resisting that ultimatum head-on, the organizers creatively scheduled an evening of all-night seminars. Thanks to the free publicity provided by the governor, thousands of students showed up for the event. We became galvanized as informed antiwar activists. I spoke at a meeting of the local Democratic Party that spring to protest Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war—another event in which Kaufman was a central speaker. We won a surprising victory and sent a letter of protest to President Johnson. Several political science professors gave me a cool reception after that for undermining the “responsible party doctrine.” Nothing serious, though, and some later became antiwar activists themselves.

I was not aware of the planning and execution of the Port Huron Statement until after it was published. It then played a role in my antiwar activism, in an essay Kaufman and I wrote for Dissent in 1968,¹ in my time as president of the New Politics Coalition in western Massachusetts, and in many antiwar events in which I participated. My sense is that the proliferating energies of the New Left were sapped by the early 1970s as one faction turned to violence, the war sputtered to an end, and many white, blue-collar workers took a scary turn to the right. Kaufman’s essay in 1969, on “Participatory Democracy: Ten Years Later,” published in The Bias of Pluralism, concluded that too many in the New Left had treated participation as the single virtue rather than one virtue to be joined to party politics and large public actions.² Reading it again now, I realize how indebted I was to it in later essays on “the paradox of politics.” One admires inspirational teachers long after specific points of influence have been forgotten .

At about the time Kaufman wrote that essay, I returned for a visit to Flint (my hometown) to find the United Automobile Workers (UAW) fractured by an intense faction of evangelical whites who now supported George Wallace, an authoritarian populist who prefigured Donald Trump. As the son of a factory worker, integrationist, and labor activist, this turn of events shook me to the core. They were participating all right, but under the stars of resentment against unions and racism.

If a central problem at the time of the Port Huron Statement was the apparent apathy of masses and the complacency of elites, today it is generic anger among a faction of the white working and middle classes, the obdurate sense of world entitlement that activates the captains of American capitalism out of synch with the most critical issues of the day, and a dilemma of electoral politics that combine together to stifle positive action.³ If major adversaries of yesteryear were the “Dixiecrats” who compromised the Democratic Party, today it is an evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine that stifles positive action even more belligerently.⁴ If the university was then seen to be a bureaucratic mess with democratic potential, today it is held hostage by neoliberal university presidents and trustees who do not respect the importance of liberal arts education to democratic citizenship. If the fruits of abundance from “industrialism” were found to be unjustly distributed then, today we also face the ecocrisis of an entire capitalist civilization of productivity. If gender, race, and class issues were less than fully understood then—the word “man” jumps out at you when you reread the document today—those issues are now both deeply ensconced in the system and complicated by a worldwide ecocrisis in the civilization of productivity and abundance. If the authors tended to assume that the future would be secular, today we realize that the secular moment in world politics was a blip in history. If both the authors of that document and their Marxist critics were sociocentric in their accounts of the world—identifying only social factors as causal forces in society—today we have come once again to the realization that a host of periodically volatile, nonhuman force fields such as climate, glacier flows, ocean currents, and disease formations are closely imbricated with economic, political, and religious practices.

The tacit assumption of “gradualism” with respect to planetary processes—adopted by geologists and paleontologists themselves until at least the 1980s—must now give way in the human sciences to deeper understandings of how planetary processes work. They foment periodic volatilities of their own that then become entangled with capitalism as a geologic force, as the two together wreak the most havoc on regions and peoples who have had the least to do with fomenting climate change.

Such needed changes in issues and perspectives on the Left are very important, indeed critical. But the spirit of the Port Huron Statement nonetheless remains highly pertinent to the definitions, elaborations, and modes of activism appropriate to today. The students who composed that noble document demanded a turn to activism during an age of elite complacency. New forces seek to recapture that spirit as they identify multisited modes of activism to respond to issues that the neoliberal-evangelical machine both foments and denies. The Left is heating up again, as it identifies cross-regional modes of activism to oomplement local and national actions. The editors of The Port Huron Statement are to be congratulated for drawing together this fine and timely volume.