Word: yd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...There's not been one success for the YD's all year," he said. "No John Lindsay, for example, as the Young Republicans had last spring. There is some energy here and I hope in the next month or two there will be a radical change in what people are doing...
Mentioning "radical change" was ironic, for SDS is Young Dems' most feared rival. Not really hated, but the existence of SDS gives some YD's their sense of mission. The sixty voters who tried to breathe life into the corpse did so because "Harvard needs a moderate voice on campus...
...POLITICS is the second, more important premise upon which the YD's intend to base their comeback this semester. New Politics would mean intruding into the Boston area, taking stands on local issues, and "going all out for left-liberal local candidates." Schumer himself is not an ideologue and he sees the YD's more as an off-campus missionary than a university debating society (which it never has been anyway). This means recruiting fifteen or twenty people to work on a committee geared for a specific project--such as the Cambridge housing drive or the Cambridge Council elections...
Schumer's pragmatism contrasts with the feelings of many who elected him. These people see in the club an ideological bastion of campus moderatism, the "real" voice of the student majority at Harvard. One admitted motive for YD interest in Cambridge's housing problems is to head off the radicals on this issue. The YD's regard SDS people as fomentors of trouble to whom they must respond--particularly in defense of civil liberties...
...like political parties. It's discouraging, of course, if undergraduates don't trust themselves to come to an opinion without embracing some form of group-think. Even then, what would a party of "moderates" do except circulate one more petition? But a certain ROTC-caught-us-unprepared jingoism pervades YD's these days...