Charles Hilu’s “The Port Huron Statement at 60: Still Not As Good As Its Counterpart” offers a welcome moment for reflection on the state of our politics since the 1960s, contrasting the New Left’s famous 1962 “Port Huron Statement” with its immediate conservative predecessor, the Young Americans for Freedom’s founding “Sharon Statement,” penned by the legendary M. Stanton Evans in 1960. In the historic context of Roe v. Wade’s demise — what Philip Klein aptly dubbed “the greatest victory in the history of the conservative movement” — it’s helpful to reflect on the beginnings of the two ideological projects that, to one degree or another, define our central political debates today: The conservative movement on the one hand, and the post-1960s New Left on the other. (As an aside, I do think Hilu is too dismissive in his conviction that “today, the Port Huron statement appears to be dead” — in many ways, its ethos defines the orthodoxy in our elite institutions today).
In contrasting the Port Huron and Sharon Statements, Hilu writes:
While Port Huron was created in despair, Sharon was drafted in hope. YAF members meeting at William F. Buckley Jr.’s home in Sharon, Conn., in September 1960 gathered there to “to affirm certain eternal truths,” including the individual’s “right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force,” and “that the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role.” In contrast to SDS longing for a more regulated economy, the Sharon Statement vaunted the market economy as “the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government,” stressing its abundance and the harm to the nation that comes from the market’s over-restriction. Most importantly, in contrast to SDS’s foreign-policy equivocation, the Sharon Statement emphasized “that the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with” communism. Even Buckley’s column in National Review announcing the creation of the group was full of optimism. He predicted that the new group would “influence the political future of this country, as why should it not, considering that its membership is young, intelligent, articulate and determined, its principles enduring.”
That all seems right to me — but one thing that Hilu omits is the similarities between the two youthful movements, as embodied in their founding documents. We rightly think of the 1960s as a time of radicalism and upheaval; but we tend to only attribute that radicalism to the student radicals of the New Left. It’s worth remembering that, in their time, William F. Buckley and the other young conservatives who were involved in the Sharon Statement were radicals, too. Tom Hayden, the author of the Port Huron Statement, noticed as much: In an essay published a year after the Sharon Statement — and a year prior to Port Huron — Hayden noted that “during the past year, conservative students have come to life.”
These were not the staid patricians of the Old Right: “What is new about the new conservatives is their militant mood, their appearance on picket lines,” Hayden wrote. “The new conservatives are not disinterested kids who maintain the status quo by political immobility, nor are they politically concerned but completely inactive sideliners. They form a bloc. They are unashamed, bold, and articulately enamored of certain doctrines: the sovereignty of individual self-interest; extremely limited government; a free-market economy; victory over, rather than coexistence with, the Communists.”
Indeed, Buckley explicitly identified with the “radical conservatives — “who are ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity” — in National Review’s 1955 mission statement. He described his political project as a “counter-revolution”; not a moderate, incrementalist accommodation to the existing state of things, but an “overturning” of “the revised view of society” brought about by the progressive revolution.
Nowhere has that progressive revolution been more potent than the courts — and nowhere was the judicial revolution more potent and corrosive than Roe. In a 1974 column calling for an overturning of Roe, Buckley described how the ruling, and the underlying philosophy that drove it, were corroding republican self-government: “The public, under the tutelage of its moral and intellectual leaders — is being trained, as regards the Supreme Court of the United States when it is interpreting the Constitution, to accept its rulings as if rendered ex cathedra, on questions of faith and morals,” he wrote. Thus, he argued, an end to Roe “would deliver the republic from a presumptuous ethical-political tribunal which has come to treat the Constitution with something like an author’s possessiveness.”
That, in the final analysis, is the significance of Friday’s decision: It is nothing less than a counter-revolution, the seeds of which were planted by our predecessors. It is, in a fundamental sense, a kind of radicalism. But it is a welcome radicalism — a radicalism that seeks to restore, rather than to destroy; to renew rather than begin anew. It is rooted in the ethos of the Sharon Statement, and in a belief in the “capability,” as Lincoln put it, “of a people to govern themselves.”