The SDS goes back to school

Here's some fodder for the next Rush Limbaugh show, if and when he stops berating Michael J. Fox for contracting Parkinson's disease: The SDS is back.

The Students for a Democratic Society, Release 2.0 or 3.0, depending on who is counting, held its first national conference over the summer and now boasts chapters at 126 colleges, such as Boston College, Brandeis, Boston University, Harvard, UMass-Amherst, and Yale. SDS also has a presence at 39 high schools, including Brookline, Hollywood High, and Phillips Exeter.

Is the n ew SDS the same as the old SDS? In some respects, yes. "The United States is bogged down in another unpopular war, the corporatization of the university continues, [and] people of color are fighting to be treated as full citizens," Matt Wasserman , a founder of the Reed College chapter, wrote earlier this year. And in some respects, no. "One of the marked differences from the old SDS is that there isn't a broad national hierarchy," says Ben Schacht , a junior at Trinity College. "Bureaucratic organization only leads to factionalism, as the old SDS showed."

The old SDS dates back to the Port Huron statement of 1962 -- now available for sale at tomhayden.com, the website of the man who wrote it. Originally conceived as a multi-issue, social democratic political organization, it drifted leftward during the decade, when it gained national visibility at ever-larger anti-Vietnam War rallies, and during the 1968 shutdown of Columbia University. One of the leaders of the Columbia protest, Mark Rudd, now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and is following the SDS renaissance. "They've got the exact same passion that we did, and they're motivated by the exact same thing we were -- grief," he says. "Grief over the murders that our country is committing."

The previous SDS begat the bomb-slinging Weathermen and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. A dysfunctional gaggle of warring factions, it had pretty well flamed out by 1970. "Why they would want to resurrect the name of a disgraced organization is beyond me," says James Miller , author of "Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago." He sees the latest SDS avatar hearkening more toward the example of early-1960s SDS. "This seems to be a much more earnest venture, more like the original SDS."

So what have they done? In an interview, Wasserman says SDS takes credit for trying to block a shipment of Stryker armored vehicles headed for Iraq at the port of Olympia, Wash., in May of this year. Six protesters were arrested. The New York press picked up on SDS's presence at anti war protests in Manhattan in March and May. If you go to the website newsds.org , you'll suss out the group's priorities pretty quickly: anti-Iraq war, anti-Wal-Mart, anti-anyone named Bush, George or Jeb.

Trinity's Schacht says he got involved with SDS because he noticed that conservatives were better organized on campus than the left. Furthermore, he feels that "left activism is dominated by moderate democratic sentiment that makes students toe a very corporate, capitalist line. When people say that they're on the left they really mean they're liberal democrats. You don't have the kind of leftism of the 1960s, where people wanted to question capitalism."

I was curious what, if anything, the youngsters knew about their agitational for e bears. "Most college students have no idea what SDS is or was," says Schacht. "That kind of historical amnesia makes it very difficult to get a discussion going." "There's a perception that the new SDS is kids playing dress-up in this historical enterprise," says Wasserman. "But it's a lot more than that. This is a new period of time and we are very aware of that.

"One of the reasons for a new SDS to exist is that old SDS was an unfinished project," he adds. "They ended with a sectarian blowout, and that is something that no one wants to go through again."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.