Visiting Columbia University last week to see the pro-Palestinian protests took me back to my own student days at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1987 to 1991.
As a journalist for the Daily Californian, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper, I covered a lot of protests for causes as varied as divesting from South Africa, ending U.S. proxy wars in Central America, getting the ROTC off campus and staying out of the 1991 Gulf War (“no blood for oil”). But underlying all of the transitory passions of the day, I detected a powerful nostalgia for the 1960s — that heady era when mere students could imagine they were heroic figures in the vanguard of historical change. It often felt as if the students of my generation were simply historical reenactors of past glories for whom the act of protest was more important than the causes for which they protested.
I discern a similar spirit of revolutionary cosplay among today’s youthful activists who claim to be creating “liberated zones” on campus quads. Indeed, the website of the National Students for Justice in Palestine — the umbrella organization coordinating protests across the country — proclaims wistfully: “There are many parallels between our current movement and the opposition to the war on Vietnam.”
In truth, the current protest movement is minuscule in comparison with the one a half-century ago. There is no military draft to galvanize student activism — this is Israel’s war, not America’s. But there is one glaring similarity between protests then and now: In both cases, the protesters’ ideological and behavioral excesses undermine the very causes for which they fight.
The antiwar movement of the 1960s has been vindicated by history; the Vietnam War is now widely seen as an unwinnable conflict that the United States should never have entered. But that doesn’t mean the protesters were effective in ending it. Far from it. Their extreme tactics — burning draft cards and U.S. flags, trying to shut down draft induction centers and universities by force, chanting pro-Vietcong slogans, clashing with police (“the pigs”) and even carrying out bombings and acts of arson — often backfired.
In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”
So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.
Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.
MAGA Republicans are wrong to exaggerate the importance of the protests or to call for the National Guard to crush them; benign neglect is generally a much more powerful weapon in dealing with attention-seeking activists. But mainstream figures in both parties are right to denounce the demonstrators’ anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish bias and their disruptions of campus life.
As a journalist for the Daily Californian, the university’s independent, student-run newspaper, I covered a lot of protests for causes as varied as divesting from South Africa, ending U.S. proxy wars in Central America, getting the ROTC off campus and staying out of the 1991 Gulf War (“no blood for oil”). But underlying all of the transitory passions of the day, I detected a powerful nostalgia for the 1960s — that heady era when mere students could imagine they were heroic figures in the vanguard of historical change. It often felt as if the students of my generation were simply historical reenactors of past glories for whom the act of protest was more important than the causes for which they protested.
I discern a similar spirit of revolutionary cosplay among today’s youthful activists who claim to be creating “liberated zones” on campus quads. Indeed, the website of the National Students for Justice in Palestine — the umbrella organization coordinating protests across the country — proclaims wistfully: “There are many parallels between our current movement and the opposition to the war on Vietnam.”
In truth, the current protest movement is minuscule in comparison with the one a half-century ago. There is no military draft to galvanize student activism — this is Israel’s war, not America’s. But there is one glaring similarity between protests then and now: In both cases, the protesters’ ideological and behavioral excesses undermine the very causes for which they fight.
The antiwar movement of the 1960s has been vindicated by history; the Vietnam War is now widely seen as an unwinnable conflict that the United States should never have entered. But that doesn’t mean the protesters were effective in ending it. Far from it. Their extreme tactics — burning draft cards and U.S. flags, trying to shut down draft induction centers and universities by force, chanting pro-Vietcong slogans, clashing with police (“the pigs”) and even carrying out bombings and acts of arson — often backfired.
In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”
So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.
Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.
MAGA Republicans are wrong to exaggerate the importance of the protests or to call for the National Guard to crush them; benign neglect is generally a much more powerful weapon in dealing with attention-seeking activists. But mainstream figures in both parties are right to denounce the demonstrators’ anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish bias and their disruptions of campus life.
