A Look Back at SDS, Michael Harrington and the Decline of Marxism According to a familiar narrative, protest is a kind of parlor game of privileged students. When it occurs on Ivy League campuses, it gets its fair share of attention, creating an impression that social/political movements based on long tradition have their point of origin there. (The 170 students arrested at the City College of New York’s Gaza encampment on April 30, 2024, largely people of color, had a median family income less than a quarter of that of the students arrested at Columbia. The news coverage—of their pepper spraying—and reported tasering—and broken teeth and bones—was delayed a few days and then relegated to the back pages. (See Sarah Baum in the Progressive Magazine) In Campus Wars, Kenneth J. Heineman points out that student mobilization against the Vietnam War–and in support of free speech and the right to organize on campus–arose initially at publicly funded state universities. Enmeshed in a hot war and a cold war, awash in DoD grants for war-related research, the universities assumed a division of labor: Elite schools turned out foreign policy “experts”; while state schools supplied teachers and engineers for the home front as well as international policing experts needed to shore up the unpopular South Vietnamese government.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/21/a-look-back-at-sds-michael-harrington-and-the-decline-of-marxism/Liberalism’s Cult of the Individual Has Failed UsIs it better to “bowl alone” than to join anything that smacks of a sect? Were the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, which put millions to work rebuilding their country, just state-sanctioned “cults?” According to one prominent liberal: maybe! In an article entitled “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” Jerusalem Demsas, the liberal publisher of The Argument magazine, goes after Democratic Senator Chris Murphy for daring to argue that we ought to have some shared social commitment to the public good. For Murphy, Americans — particularly young men — are living through an epidemic of loneliness that’s not only corroding our democracy but destroying the social bonds that hold our society together. These men, par
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