I was a bit pleased and a bit puzzled to see that the planting of flags, a week or so ago, all over the Reed College campus in honor of the war dead had been headed up by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society.) The original SDS, of the early 1960s, had fractured into a million acts of idiocy, foolishness, personal vanity and age. What was left was a memory of brilliant beginnngs, the hibernated root of the tentative progressivism growing up through the cracks of the crumbling Democratic house.

Here follows some explanation of the reappearance. It seems indeed that there has been a re-cloaking of activism and vision with the name of the once vibrant student movement, and a re-emergence of some of its participatory democracy neurons. Some of the gray beards are equivocal about the usurpation but don’t count me among them. Learn from the past says I: repeat the good and skip the bad. As frameworks go, early SDS is not a bad one.

The Nation: The New SDS