Miller, James A. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

== Summary ==
James
Miller’s book brings to light the intellectual origins of the New Left, via the
SDS, that was lost by tear gas, drugs, and pseudo-Marxism by the end of the
decade (1968). In particular he is responding to scholarship by Allen Matusow
and Irwin Unger who both largely treated the SDS as devoid of ideology (also
think about this in relation to Anderson’s later book, which also largely
ignores ideology). Miller argues that SDS took “their central political ideas
not from the civil rights movement, but rather from the tradition of civic
republicanism that links Aristotle to John Dewey.” (16) Miller takes a
biographical approach to his study of the New Left, highlighting the handful of
leaders that took SDS’ political vision to heart (Tom Hayden, Robert Alan
Haber, Sharon Jeffrey, Bob Ross, Paul Booth). Tom Hayden and Al Haber connected
issues of the Cold War and the arms race to poverty, education, and racism. SDS
was envisioned as an organization to mobilize students around these issues,
especially the domestic concerns that were marginalized by the Cold War. The goal
of SDS was Participatory Democracy -  an
open invitation; however, Miller contends, Participatory Democracy was never
fully explained or defined. Miller argues: “The broader political vision of
participatory democracy went largely unexamined. Because the vision was never
codified and clarified and pass on as a formal doctrine of democracy, no shared
approach to grappling with objections and difficulties was handed down.”  (152) The result was a continuing series of
crises on questions of leadership, organization, and decision-making. By the
mid-1960s, concerns over gender inequality with the organization also affected
SDS. It thus left SDS open to irrational and shortsighted tactics and
strategies that kept if from realizing its objectives.