Finally, a posting at Left2Right that I can endorse with enthusiasm.  An excerpt:

The Port Huron Statement is about democratic ideals.  It’s about America’s emergence from World War II as the beacon of those ideals and about our country’s failure to be faithful to them.  The chief failings the document pointed to were the oppression and disenfranchisement of black Americans throughout the Jim Crow South and the quietism produced by the Cold War.  To the authors of The Port Huron Statement, these failings were reflected, on the one hand, in the domination of Congress by Southern segregationists and, on the other, in the control of economic and foreign policy by military and business elites, what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial complex.  Universities too were criticized for their complicity in this complex and their ready acquiescence in modi operandi that discouraged political controversy and dissent on campus.  To remedy these failings, the authors set out an ambitious agenda for social change and a program for mobilizing students to become, through active participation in democratic institutions, agents of that change.  They did not call for a return to agrarian simplicity; they weren’t troubled by bigness or anonymity or urbanization.  They were troubled by the specific anti-democratic forces they identified, those blocking progress in the efforts to dismantle the machinery of Southern segregation and those promoting passivity among Americans by using the tense relations between the United States and the Soviet Union to keep up a constant, if low level, fear of nuclear holocaust, a fear that became real and high-level several months later when the Cuban missile crisis occurred….

The reason The Port Huron Statement remains an important document is that it is a model political manifesto of the American left.  It puts forth a simple but very powerful idea, democracy that enlists the active participation of its citizens in its institutions, and it uses this idea to analyze the social conditions of its time, to criticize, in view of those conditions, the political and economic institutions that produced them, and to propose remedies that would move the country toward being a more truly democratic republic. The American left, as far as I’m aware, has produced nothing like it since.  After nearly ten years of relative peace and prosperity, our country is now embarked on an open-ended and costly war on terrorism, whose enemy is even more ill-defined than "the international communist conspiracy" of yesteryear, and the legislative and executive branches of our government are now firmly in the hands of a political party that is bent on reducing the role of government in the country’s economic affairs, which plainly means increasing the influence of large and powerful private corporations in shaping our lives.  The American left, never an especially unified force, seems to have fractured into a cluster of pressure groups vying for support for their signature issues.  So divided, it cannot hope to mount effective opposition to the authoritarian and plutocratic trends that have set in and are being furthered under the cover of policies to spread democracy and freedom to the Islamic Middle East and to create an ownership society….[L]ooking back to The Port Huron Statement would be one way to see how to articulate and organize a full political program for arresting and reversing these trends.

As an extra bonus, a colleague wrote it.  And I commend his intelligence in not opening comments!