Word: sds
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...Wright Mills had been the first to say that the pluralist, end-of-ideology emperor had no clothes, but SDS was the first organized attempt to challenge the smugness of the American celebration of the nineteen-fifties. In response to liberal academics like S.M. Lipset, Daniel Bell, and others who maintained that fundamental conflict was absent in post-industrial America, and that decisions about the direction of society were purely technical, SDS's founding charter--the Port Huron Statement--condemned a "perverted democracy" that permitted "disastrous policies to go unchallenged time and again." These charges--which seem mild in retrospect...
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. chant at 1969 SDS national convention...
...SDS traveled a long way during the sixties. After Port Huron, it went through a left-liberal stage ("Part of the way with LBJ") and quickened its ideological tempo as the American smugness evaporated in Southeast Asia and in the ghettos. By the 1969 convention, the organization was riddled with factions which split over such issues as whether blacks were a colony of the American Empire or a super-exploited part of the working class...
...strain of consistency runs through the ideological meanderings of SDS. Its members were almost exclusively college students who were primarily concerned with campus and campus-related issues--student power and free speech, ROTC on campus, black studies, university expansion, and in general, the symbiotic relationship of the colleges and universities to an American government that repressed rebellions in the ghettos and revolutions overseas...
...lack of any radical base outside the university provides a basis for understanding why SDS split in 1969. Although the American working class--both white and blue collar--became increasingly restive during the late sixties, the New Left failed to expand into the communities and offer answers to these grievances; its alienation from the American experience led to its increasing factionalization, elitism and estrangement from serious reality...