America’s Elites Fear the Ghost of 1968

Mainstream elites are adopting a reactionary tale about the “leftist” indoctrination of America’s youth that verges on the conspiratorial and is destined to give the Right a major boost

Columbia students who have occupied a university building are facing the police in April 1968 – credit: Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

What is going on in America? What is happening at America’s colleges? What animates these young people to rebel and revolt? To be so… radical?

It’s been a little over two weeks since the leadership of Columbia University decided to call the police on its own students – answering a small and almost entirely peaceful protest with brute force. Predictably, the most tangible result of this mobilization of the coercive powers of the state has been escalation. The protests have spread across the country.

America’s mainstream elites have reacted with consternation, frustration, anger, and fear. Why on earth are these young people doing this? George Packer believes he has figured out the answer. Packer is one of the nation’s best-known journalists, essayists, and commentators. From the center-right through the center-left, he is almost universally regarded as a key chronicler of American life and politics in the twenty-first century. Unsurprisingly, when Packer presented his grand interpretation of the events in an essay in The Atlantic a week after the escalation at Columbia and harshly condemned not only the students, but the larger leftwing forces he sees at work here, those who have been aghast at the sight of young student rebels defying order have accepted his word as gospel.

The only problem is that Packer’s interpretation is completely off. As an empirical analysis, it doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny. His essay is still valuable, however – as a window into the elite anxieties and grievances that are driving so much of mainstream politics in America today.

In “The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education,” George Packer argues that America’s institutions of higher education have “trashed the postwar ideal of the liberal university” and abandoned the “disinterested pursuit of truth.” Instead, Marxist ideas and identity theories came to dominate the institutions as the young radicals whose protests they had animated in the 1960s took over the universities as faculty and administrators. The infamous “long march through the institutions” that 60s radicals dreamed about actually happened, Packer declares: What was only fringe when students occupied Columbia University buildings in the spring of 1968 has become the “new orthodoxy.” Universities now deliberately operate as indoctrination chambers imposing this “new orthodoxy” on young people. They are “reaping the consequences” of propagating these radical ideologies and teachings, having brainwashed young kids into a bunch of restless extremists who want to cosplay as oppressed revolutionaries. What a story!

Packer opens his essay with the scenes from April 1968: Columbia University is occupied by student rebels. The idea that there is a connection, a direct line from the protests of 56 years ago to what is currently happening across the country forms the core of his argument. Yet the first thing that stands out about Packer’s piece is that it offers zero engagement with the actual substance of the protests of either 1968 or 2024.

Instead of at least acknowledging that the protests unfolded in specific contexts, that students – justifiably or not – reacted to particular events, Packer only sees lame repetition indicative of a lack of imagination: “the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?”

Is there a chance that maybe we are not just looking at a bunch of kids who are merely imitating previous eras of protest, but at a generational response to real issues and problems? Since Packer dogmatically rejects lending any legitimacy or credence to the protests, he would rather just ignore those questions.  

Remarkably, he does mention briefly that the student rebels in the 60s turned out to be right: “The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters.” But this rather significant fact does not seem to impact Packer’s assessment in the slightest. Instead, he presents a caricature of what supposedly animated these students over half a century ago. What destroyed “the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists” was the teaching of “the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left.” From Marcuse, Packer suggests, the students adopted the idea that liberal society only offered “repressive tolerance” that wasn’t liberal or tolerant at all, nor were the institutions that sustained it, “and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.”

It is true that Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse’s diagnosis of how power functions, how it is concealed, and how it curtails freedom had a significant impact on how the student movement in the 1960s approached and articulated its critique of society. It is also true that the students rejected the idea that the university existed separate from the power dynamics and political conflicts that shaped society, the chimera of the university as a temple of “disinterested pursuit of truth” – which is what Packer wants us to believe it had previously been. Had Packer cared to engage with their arguments, he might have discovered that the students outlined a rather sophisticated understanding of their place in the university and the university’s place in society.

The university within society

“The most important fact about the Columbia strike is that Columbia exists within American society,” the Columbia Strike Coordinating Committee (SCC) proclaimed in the fall of 1968, as the university was coming back after the summer break. The Committee had formed in the spring to represent the striking students, and it was dominated by members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Because it existed within society, the larger problems and injustices that shaped America inevitably manifested on the campus, as the Committee explained: “striking students are responding to the totality of the conditions of our society, not just one small part of it, the university. We are disgusted with the war, with racism, with being a part of a system over which we have no control, a system which demands gross inequalities of wealth and power, a system which denies personal and social freedom and potential, a system which has to manipulate and repress us in order to exist.”

The university did more than just reflect these issues, however. It actively functioned as a key part of the machine – an institution designed to perpetuate and stabilize the system: “The university can only be seen as a cog in this machine; or, more accurately, a factory whose product is knowledge and personnel (us) useful to the functioning of the system.”

In the famous Port Huron Statement, the SDS’s 1962 manifesto, this idea of the university as a “seat of influence” had been fully flashed out in a chapter titled “University and Social Change.” The SDS regarded the university as an enormously important and massively impactful institution: “Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes.”  Not only was it “the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge”; in a more direct sense, the research it produced was crucial for the system, as evidenced by university engineers being protagonists in the Cold War arms race, by the way corporations used “modern social science as a manipulative tool,” and by the fact that “the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect in American society.” All of this, ultimately, demonstrated what the SDS called “the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge.”

It was precisely because of its prominent position within the system, the students believed, that the university could also function as a place from which change might originate. The goal SDS outlined was to transform it from a “cog in the machine” into an engine of progress. The university, they believed, provided a unique ecosystem that brought young people together, all over the country, who were free to think, explore, connect, and organize – people who were not yet bound by rigid ideological traditions or party discipline. This was indeed an idea shared basically wherever protests erupted towards the end of the 1960s – in about 60 countries at the same time, in the “West” as well as behind the Iron Curtain, in the North as well as in the Global South: The campus was the epicenter of the protests everywhere, but it was only the beginning of what this truly transnational protest movement sought to achieve. “We realize that the University is entirely synchronized with this society,” the Columbia Strike Committee declared: “how can you have a free, human university in a society such as this? Hence the SDS slogan: A free university in a free society. The converse is equally true.”

Was this belief in potential for lasting change emanating from campus protests too optimistic, naïve even? Maybe. Was there an element of self-aggrandizement in these proclamations, driven by the desire of young people to be recognized as the true agents of world-historical change? Certainly. Did the actual solutions they offered always match the problems and shortcomings they diagnosed? Were all their demands reasonable, practical? I don’t think so. But let’s not forget that their initial problem diagnosis and understanding of the university’s place in society was vastly more plausible and historically accurate than what one of the nation’s leading commentators now has to offer in The Atlantic. Has George Packer never heard of the fact that the postwar era he says was defined by the ideal of a “disinterested pursuit of truth” was actually the time when the academic system and research institutions were mobilized as part of the Cold War effort? When what counted as “truth” at American universities was narrowly confined to whatever wouldn’t trigger anti-Communist hysteria? When politics and academic research were more closely and more directly intertwined than ever, as social scientists rose to the status of key political advisors and directly shaped and impacted America’s foreign and security strategies? Does he just not care?

Reactionary nostalgia trumps all else

Packer certainly doesn’t want to hear any of that. The “postwar ideal of the liberal university” has been “trashed,” he angrily declares. No thinking person should fall for such unfiltered nostalgia for a supposedly golden past that never actually existed. Are we to believe that things were so much better back then, when women and people of color were mostly excluded from those temples of pure reason. That was, as Bret Stephens put it in January in a raging anti-DEI column, before “the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts … blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.” Ah yes, when almost everyone in higher education still looked like Packer and Stephens, that’s when we still followed the ideals of excellence and intellectual merit, before the “intellectual rot” of “woke” leftist diversity social engineering, before we let the “muscle of independent thinking and debate” atrophy, as Packer bemoans.

If packer is to be believed, universities now engage in pure ideological indoctrination, just like the leftist radicals of the 1960s imagined: “A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors – the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the ‘long march through the institutions’ – bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend.”

Let’s see how this timeline is supposed to work: Most tenured or tenure-track university professors will be anywhere from 40 to 60 years old – that means they are far too young to have been personally involved in “1968.”  So, the student rebels became professors who indoctrinated students, who then became professors who indoctrinated me (I was born in 1982), and then I became a professor who is indoctrinating students? Is that it? Interestingly, Packer does not provide a single example for the “essentially unbroken” line he suggests binds today’s students to 1968.

But it’s not just on the level of students-turned-indoctrinators where that continuity is supposed to explain our present, but also on the level of what several generations of students have supposedly been indoctrinated to believe: A long line of the very same dangerous leftist ideas:

“Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.”

Does Packer care that the vast majority of students is highly unlikely to be meaningfully exposed to any of these ideas during their studies? Are we supposed to believe that business students are trained to adore postcolonial theory? Engineering? Computer sciences?

“Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024,” Packer says, “is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities – administrators, faculty, students.” Oh, would that be the same administrators that are currently calling the cops on their own students? I don’t mean to be flip, but the idea that the administrative power centers of elite universities are dominated by leftwing radicals indoctrinated with critical theory is utterly bonkers.

Maybe Packer is really just talking about the humanities? If so, he’s not being honest about it. Most importantly, he fails to present even a shred of evidence that would substantiate his far-reaching indoctrination claims. The only thing we are getting is a long quote from an anonymous student who makes exactly Packer’s argument: The only thing students are being taught is “decolonization” (again, all the students? In all the fields?) – and that somehow compels them to play revolution on campus.  

There it is, that terrifying word: “decolonization.” Packer is evidently not referring to the vast and diverse body of thought that presents itself / is being presented under this label. He is just using “decolonization” as a master-signifier for everything that is “woke leftwing extremism.” You know who’s been pushing that exact strategy as a way to delegitimize the leftist enemy really hard in recent months: Christopher Rufo. On October 13, the country’s most successful far-right activist and grievance entrepreneur posted on Twitter/X that “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.” This is the exact same playbook he used to manufacture the anti-“CRT” hysteria: Find a signifier that serves to conjure up all sorts of things people don’t like and fear, regardless of what it actually means, associate it with “the Left,” then keep pouncing. And once again, the center obliges and lends credibility. Just one day later, Conor Friedersdorf declared in The Atlantic that “flawed ideas informed the violence-endorsing statements” and that “concepts like ‘decolonization’” needed to be scrutinized. And here is George Packer now: “Decolonization.” Dangerous (no attempt to unpack the term – just a signifier…).

An Alliance of Reaction between the Far-Right and the Center

I bring up Christopher Rufo because the story George Packer presents in The Atlantic is very much in line with what Rufo has been propagating. Last summer, Rufo published his manifesto in book form – and the title serves as the rallying cry for the counter-revolutionary Right: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo needs us to believe radical leftism is so ubiquitous, so dangerous, that nothing but an equally radical counter-revolution to seize control of the state and all major institutions in order to impose proper American values on the country will do to save the United States. His sole mission is to convince enough people that there is such a thing as “The Left” – a unified, homogeneous, devious, radical force – that is dominating nearly all aspects of life in America by imposing a dangerous, subversive ideology on the country. And the genealogy of that leftist ideology is very close to the one Packer presents: A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse!) to the protests of 2020 – in Packer’s telling: to Columbia 2024.

I can’t say if Packer read Rufo’s book and found himself agreeing. I doubt it. It’s more likely he picked it up from Yascha Mounk’s latest book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time that also came out last summer – actually, there has been a flurry of books from self-regarding centrists or liberals who have all presented slightly more polite versions of the very same argument, about the corrosive effect of dangerous leftist, “woke” ideas. Their combined impact has been to launder, legitimize, and thoroughly mainstream this tale. It’s striking how Rufo, Mounk, and Packer are all harping on Dutschke’s “march through the institutions” as if they had found the smoking gun that uncovered a vast conspiracy – as if the fact that a West-German student leader in the 60s made a grand proclamation was evidence enough of a vast leftist takeover of all major institutions.

The fact that Packer functionally agrees with Rufo’s diagnosis of the problem doesn’t mean he would support the solution Rufo suggests. Packer may not feel comfortable with the “counter-revolution” Rufo desires. But leading centrists and self-regarding center-liberals have also been adamant that order needs to be restored – by all means! And they have come up with the darndest comparisons and historical analogies to justify their desire to see this campus unrest quelled by the state. Aren’t the Columbia students basically just like the “Jan 6 rioters,” asked Thomas Chatterton Williams, also a staff writer at The Atlantic and one of the nation’s foremost Free Speech Crisis pundits? Because, you see, if you operate at an extremely misleading level of abstraction and ignore all context, then students and insurrectionists were both engaging in “laying siege to property,” were they not?  Meanwhile, Caitlin Flanagan (another staff writer at The Atlantic – what?) called the occupation of a university building “Kristallnacht on the Hudson.” The actual “Kristallnacht” was a country-wide pogrom in November 1938 in which the Nazis killed hundreds of German Jews, threw tens of thousands in concentration camps, destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses. The student protesters didn’t actually hurt anyone – but, well, they did break some windows. It’s fitting, I guess, that someone like Flanagan would use a euphemistic expression referring to the shards of broken glass that obscures the enormous level of violence against Jewish people. The November pogrom was not just an act of vandalism. It was a key escalation towards the systematic persecution of German Jews – a crucial step in a process of radicalization that ultimately, during the war, led to the slaughtering of millions. Anyone who believes the Holocaust matters – as a historical event and as politically and morally meaningful reference, warning, and call to action – must unequivocally reject such bizarre and utterly ridiculous instrumentalization, such mendacious trivialization. Then again, I assume Flanagan knows what she is doing, equating student protests with the horrors of the mass atrocities committed by Nazi Germany in order to legitimize violence against the protesters. Finally, I give you David Frum (who is, wait a minute, a staff writer at The Atlantic? Huh.) who declared that “If you don't want to be Weimar, you unapologetically enforce public order against both the Reds and the Browns.” Because the student protesters are the equivalent of militant communists in early 1930s Germany who were the equivalent of the Nazis and you really have to enforce order or these students will get us Hitler!

I wrote this last week, and it bears repeating: This crackdown on college protests and the support it is receiving from mainstream elites is about Israel and Gaza – and is not just about Israel and Gaza. It is also fueled by a pervasive sense that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals urgently need to be reined in. Maybe they were given too much rope during the Trump era, during the mass protests in the summer of 2020, specifically, when most of the mainstream elite felt compelled, momentarily, to lend its support to an uprising. But to status quo fundamentalists, uprisings are ultimately dangerous and must not be tolerated. The prevailing view on the center seems to be that we need to turn the clock back, to a time before what they see as the current excesses of radical leftism, “wokeism,” identity politics, “cancel culture”… Too much “chaos,” too much “unrest” and “turmoil.” Who can stem the tide? Centrist elites seem convinced that those young radicals must be prevented from toppling an order of reason and stability by any means necessary. And if that puts them in an alliance with Christopher Rufo, Elise Stefanik, and every rightwing bloodhound? The answer, apparently, is: So be it.

You will never get any of these centrists to admit that’s what is happening, of course. If rightwing extremism rises, they know who is to blame: The Left and those unruly students! “The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left,” George Packer warns: “It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon.” Has it ever occurred to him, even for a second, that he is doing a tremendous job at helping the Right exploit the situation?