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
Somebody might want to tell the elites that Spiro Agnew, Abbie Hoffman, Dick Nixon, and Jerry Rubin are all dead. The last of the four became a stockbroker. Eldridge Cleaver became a "born-again Christian," and supported Ronald Reagan. And Jane Fonda is 82.
Sometimes I think this country will never get over losing the Vietnam War and stop finding an internal scapegoat to blame.
This is such a wonderful and helpful unpacking of a complex situation. Thank you. My intuition has been to feel less than completely sympathetic with what feels like a good-faith and nevertheless somewhat reductive scolding from those in the center about those on the “radical left”, and this careful analysis helps me understand much better why and how I might reasonably feel that way. It seems to me that well-meaning centrists seem to be criticizing others without, perhaps, as much self-reflection or insight into how their own voices contribute to the overall zeitgeist and fractiousness of fear. On the one hand, it seems the center - which, on its face, seems to me a home for far more people in far more positions of social influence than the radical left - both scolds the “fringe” and at the same time seems to lament its own relative lack of power relative to these destructive forces. (How we are defining the concept of “fringe” here is another question.) A discomfort with and disapproval of disruption and unruliness that is surely essentially human - who isn’t made somewhat anxious and worried by instability? And who doesn’t understand that violence and property destruction are corrosive? - overcomes any curiosity about message. On the one hand, that is surely a fundamental obstacle to effectiveness when it comes to protest. On the other, how ironic for that discomfort to be so overwhelming among people who consider themselves the most reasonable defenders of a country founded on and through the power and legitimation of inherently somewhat messy and never fully controlled civil disobedience.
"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!" A centrist pal of mine commented on FB that he's worried that the campus protests will result in a Trump victory and he compared this to when Nixon ended up elected in 1972. I had a SMH moment of "this is really what you are worried about---Biden's campaign---far more so than what these students are concerned about--being tired of militarism, starving children, genocide, etc... But he's often commented on radical "leftists" up here in the Twin Cities of MN. He's a centrist Dem in rural MN. He's totally more concerned with order more than justice. So so many like this. Maddening.
This analysis fails. We're living in an "align to grid labels" and an "apply filters to signals to clean up (simplify) frequencies" and "increase loudness" age. Ideas are dead, as God is dead. Learn from synths and samples and digital analog workstations, aiming at platforms that transmit and apply their own filters and chains of filters. At the same time, target audience is splitting into more and less aware fragments which can link up faster and apply filters too. Filters are then attached to people identified as wielding them well or badly, with good or ill intent. The technological environment has changed enormously, and idea based analyses built on genealogies will fade away.
Thanks for this. Packer has been treading ever more reactionary in recent years. His takes usually seem like rehashed conventional wisdom a la David Brooks. It's wild how supposed liberals seem to be all for a police state crackdown when they disagree with protesters. The increasingly politicized Thin Blue Line seems to be rehearsing for the suppression of protests should Trump scam his way back into the White House. While actual American Jews have often been leading voices protesting against the 50-year effort to erase the Palestinians, the Israel lobby has forcefully intervened in American politics to promote anti-intellectual Trumpism and shut down rational debate. They shamelessly exploit the legacy of the Holocaust to commit genocide in the present. It is not uncommon for a bullied child to compensate by bullying others. Nations seem no different, fostering an endless legacy of .transitive cruelty. I like Biden, but Netanyahu has played him for a fool. Biden's complicity in Israeli's actions and his meh response to the protests have certainly lessen my enthusiasm, although I will do what I can to prevent Trump from returning to office.
Having started life in 1960s California and lived around the world for the following 62 years, I've come to the conclusion that the United States is a fundamentally conservative and imperial culture, and what many of us thought was a move to the center during the mid-and late 20th century was an aberration.
Fantastic piece and one that drums up so much, having been one of those student 'radicals' protesting South African apartheid in the 80s. Packer's delusional piece ignores so much of what it means to be a student. Those lucky enough to be able to afford and find themselves there have a privilege and freedom they rarely get afterwards in life. Surrounded by a multitude of ideas and not bound by the influence of monied interests, they are free to assess and express in ways jobs, careers and the proverbial 'rat race' never allow. The students aren't beholden to other parties, their livelihoods don't depend on lobbyists, their investments are threatened. Missing is much of the mainstream analysis in this current story is just that - the unhindered idea that someone might not want their government to fund the indiscriminate killing of an entire people. Instead, we are regaled with ahistorical analysis, conspiratorial outside agitators, and of course, Marxism. That one never fails to show up. Calling it 'indoctrination' has the same effect in society as using the term 'woke' and as dumb as using a term like 'cultural Marxism'. It is to deflect from the core issue here. In Packer's mind and in the minds of others like him, the students couldn't possibly have looked at the historical record, the decades of apartheid, the continual terrorism it has fostered, and the ultimate genocidal response and come to the conclusion that their learning institution should divest from that. Nope, in their minds, must be Marxists. It's stupid, lazy, and as Dr. Zimmer argued, complete at odds with the historical record. Well done, another great piece.
If George Fucking Packer is now a "centrist," then the Overton Window has moved a lot further right than even I expected. Go read the man's pathetic bullshit about the War on Terra or Widdle Georgie's Invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq, 20 years ago. He's a fucking idiot with his head so far up his ass he now mistakes what he's breathing up there for Chanel No. 5, rather than what it is, and he has been doing that for even longer than Brett Moron Stephens and the rest of these over-paid, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable "pundits" ("Pundit" - a job taken by people incapable of doing anything else, whose family connections allow them to run in the circles of the quasi-"informed", where they are hired to spout bullshit as if it was oil and as valuable). They've all been wrong about everything forever!! George Burns would be happy to see how well they have adopted his Burns Secret of Success: find something you enjoy doing and then convince someone to pay you to do it.
For someone as young as you are, you've done your research on the 60s. I say that as a former member of SDS (I left when the Weather Morons and the Revolutionary Communist Yoots took over), who was around for most of the events you mention and many you don't (I still have friends 56 years later who were among the 700 clubbed by the NYPD clearing Hamilton Hall at Columbia 50 years to the day before they did it again this past week); me and the rest of us who ran the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse outside Fort Hood were the ones who "neutralized" the 5,000 mostly antiwar veteran troops being sent to Chicago for the '68 convention, leading to the CPD riot.
Your analysis of the fact the New Left did not "march through the institutions" is so obviously the truth that one would think even a semi-literate like Packer would hang that one up, but as P.T. Barnum accurately observed, "there's a sucker born every minute" and many of those suckers have the money to allow Packer to maintain the lifestyle and reputation to which he has become accustomed.
My upset with the students of 2024 as compared with those of us in 1968 lies in my fear that they're going to be stupid enough and naive enough to make the same mistake we made back then when our "revolutionary purity" led us to not vote for Hubert Humphrey because he and the Democrats were "unworthy" of our support, and by so doing elected Richard Nixon and brought on the Second American War in Southeast Asia, (the majority of American deaths in the war happened under his watch until he and Henry the War Criminal finally accepted the exact same peace agreement in December 1972 that Johnson's negotiators had said yes to in November 1968); not only that, we kept him in office in 1972 so he could continue his assault on the New Deal Society that had given more Americans more of what the "American Dream" was supposed to contain, an assault that has continued with every GOP pissant since Tricky Dicky, to provide us with the "wonderful life" we have today.
Seeing a photo yesterday of a protester carrying a sign "Don't Make Me Vote For Trump!" leads me to believe there's a significant number of them who are as stupid now as we non-voters were then.
In hindsight, student demonstrators were right about Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, apartheid and the Iraq War. They are right about the consequences of climate change. I don't endorse violence, intimidation, harassment or vandalism, but I do endorse students who are trying to figure out how the world works (and doesn't work) and how they fit into the picture. Using violence and force against peaceful protestors does not solve any problems. Your essay accurately challenges the views against the students and calls out some of the ridiculous analogies being offered up. Anyone who sees the world as Christopher Rufo does is automatically suspect in my book.
I wonder if we will ever get relief from the hegemony of right-wing ideology. I'm sick of having to live in a society where dumb, vile slop of the kind you dissect here has to be taken seriously, and is treated by almost everyone else as though it were a substantive contribution to political discourse. I want to live in the world of Chris Rufo, where leftists control everything instead of nothing.
In 1991 I was part of a group of students at the University of Notre Dame who protested the Persian Gulf War (World Peace Action Group). No violence, no police, pretty mild overall. But what I remember most vividly was that we tried to co-sponsor a protest/event with the non-sanctioned LGBT group on campus, and our Catholic university said that this was just a step too far. I applaud the student protestors--you are seeing something that is wrong and you are saying to your school, stop supporting what is so clearly wrong. Keep it up.
South Bend is my hometown. I lived on ND Avenue. Thanks for standing up in 1991. ND seems so different now--fewer Post Vatican 2 Catholics and more of the right wing kind.
Somebody might want to tell the elites that Spiro Agnew, Abbie Hoffman, Dick Nixon, and Jerry Rubin are all dead. The last of the four became a stockbroker. Eldridge Cleaver became a "born-again Christian," and supported Ronald Reagan. And Jane Fonda is 82.
Sometimes I think this country will never get over losing the Vietnam War and stop finding an internal scapegoat to blame.
This is such a wonderful and helpful unpacking of a complex situation. Thank you. My intuition has been to feel less than completely sympathetic with what feels like a good-faith and nevertheless somewhat reductive scolding from those in the center about those on the “radical left”, and this careful analysis helps me understand much better why and how I might reasonably feel that way. It seems to me that well-meaning centrists seem to be criticizing others without, perhaps, as much self-reflection or insight into how their own voices contribute to the overall zeitgeist and fractiousness of fear. On the one hand, it seems the center - which, on its face, seems to me a home for far more people in far more positions of social influence than the radical left - both scolds the “fringe” and at the same time seems to lament its own relative lack of power relative to these destructive forces. (How we are defining the concept of “fringe” here is another question.) A discomfort with and disapproval of disruption and unruliness that is surely essentially human - who isn’t made somewhat anxious and worried by instability? And who doesn’t understand that violence and property destruction are corrosive? - overcomes any curiosity about message. On the one hand, that is surely a fundamental obstacle to effectiveness when it comes to protest. On the other, how ironic for that discomfort to be so overwhelming among people who consider themselves the most reasonable defenders of a country founded on and through the power and legitimation of inherently somewhat messy and never fully controlled civil disobedience.
"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!" A centrist pal of mine commented on FB that he's worried that the campus protests will result in a Trump victory and he compared this to when Nixon ended up elected in 1972. I had a SMH moment of "this is really what you are worried about---Biden's campaign---far more so than what these students are concerned about--being tired of militarism, starving children, genocide, etc... But he's often commented on radical "leftists" up here in the Twin Cities of MN. He's a centrist Dem in rural MN. He's totally more concerned with order more than justice. So so many like this. Maddening.
This analysis fails. We're living in an "align to grid labels" and an "apply filters to signals to clean up (simplify) frequencies" and "increase loudness" age. Ideas are dead, as God is dead. Learn from synths and samples and digital analog workstations, aiming at platforms that transmit and apply their own filters and chains of filters. At the same time, target audience is splitting into more and less aware fragments which can link up faster and apply filters too. Filters are then attached to people identified as wielding them well or badly, with good or ill intent. The technological environment has changed enormously, and idea based analyses built on genealogies will fade away.
“If you don't want to be Weimar, you unapologetically enforce public order against both the Reds and the Browns.” --David Frum.
Actually, if you want to be Weimar you unapologetically enforce public order against the Left while favoring the Right. History 101.
Excellent analysis as always. I am constantly amazed at how reactionary the center and center left really are.
Thanks for this. Packer has been treading ever more reactionary in recent years. His takes usually seem like rehashed conventional wisdom a la David Brooks. It's wild how supposed liberals seem to be all for a police state crackdown when they disagree with protesters. The increasingly politicized Thin Blue Line seems to be rehearsing for the suppression of protests should Trump scam his way back into the White House. While actual American Jews have often been leading voices protesting against the 50-year effort to erase the Palestinians, the Israel lobby has forcefully intervened in American politics to promote anti-intellectual Trumpism and shut down rational debate. They shamelessly exploit the legacy of the Holocaust to commit genocide in the present. It is not uncommon for a bullied child to compensate by bullying others. Nations seem no different, fostering an endless legacy of .transitive cruelty. I like Biden, but Netanyahu has played him for a fool. Biden's complicity in Israeli's actions and his meh response to the protests have certainly lessen my enthusiasm, although I will do what I can to prevent Trump from returning to office.
Packer was always reactionary.
Having started life in 1960s California and lived around the world for the following 62 years, I've come to the conclusion that the United States is a fundamentally conservative and imperial culture, and what many of us thought was a move to the center during the mid-and late 20th century was an aberration.
A brilliant article…really great. I do have to wonder though what’s in the water cooler at The Atlantic?
Fantastic piece and one that drums up so much, having been one of those student 'radicals' protesting South African apartheid in the 80s. Packer's delusional piece ignores so much of what it means to be a student. Those lucky enough to be able to afford and find themselves there have a privilege and freedom they rarely get afterwards in life. Surrounded by a multitude of ideas and not bound by the influence of monied interests, they are free to assess and express in ways jobs, careers and the proverbial 'rat race' never allow. The students aren't beholden to other parties, their livelihoods don't depend on lobbyists, their investments are threatened. Missing is much of the mainstream analysis in this current story is just that - the unhindered idea that someone might not want their government to fund the indiscriminate killing of an entire people. Instead, we are regaled with ahistorical analysis, conspiratorial outside agitators, and of course, Marxism. That one never fails to show up. Calling it 'indoctrination' has the same effect in society as using the term 'woke' and as dumb as using a term like 'cultural Marxism'. It is to deflect from the core issue here. In Packer's mind and in the minds of others like him, the students couldn't possibly have looked at the historical record, the decades of apartheid, the continual terrorism it has fostered, and the ultimate genocidal response and come to the conclusion that their learning institution should divest from that. Nope, in their minds, must be Marxists. It's stupid, lazy, and as Dr. Zimmer argued, complete at odds with the historical record. Well done, another great piece.
Beautifully argued!
If George Fucking Packer is now a "centrist," then the Overton Window has moved a lot further right than even I expected. Go read the man's pathetic bullshit about the War on Terra or Widdle Georgie's Invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq, 20 years ago. He's a fucking idiot with his head so far up his ass he now mistakes what he's breathing up there for Chanel No. 5, rather than what it is, and he has been doing that for even longer than Brett Moron Stephens and the rest of these over-paid, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable "pundits" ("Pundit" - a job taken by people incapable of doing anything else, whose family connections allow them to run in the circles of the quasi-"informed", where they are hired to spout bullshit as if it was oil and as valuable). They've all been wrong about everything forever!! George Burns would be happy to see how well they have adopted his Burns Secret of Success: find something you enjoy doing and then convince someone to pay you to do it.
For someone as young as you are, you've done your research on the 60s. I say that as a former member of SDS (I left when the Weather Morons and the Revolutionary Communist Yoots took over), who was around for most of the events you mention and many you don't (I still have friends 56 years later who were among the 700 clubbed by the NYPD clearing Hamilton Hall at Columbia 50 years to the day before they did it again this past week); me and the rest of us who ran the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse outside Fort Hood were the ones who "neutralized" the 5,000 mostly antiwar veteran troops being sent to Chicago for the '68 convention, leading to the CPD riot.
Your analysis of the fact the New Left did not "march through the institutions" is so obviously the truth that one would think even a semi-literate like Packer would hang that one up, but as P.T. Barnum accurately observed, "there's a sucker born every minute" and many of those suckers have the money to allow Packer to maintain the lifestyle and reputation to which he has become accustomed.
My upset with the students of 2024 as compared with those of us in 1968 lies in my fear that they're going to be stupid enough and naive enough to make the same mistake we made back then when our "revolutionary purity" led us to not vote for Hubert Humphrey because he and the Democrats were "unworthy" of our support, and by so doing elected Richard Nixon and brought on the Second American War in Southeast Asia, (the majority of American deaths in the war happened under his watch until he and Henry the War Criminal finally accepted the exact same peace agreement in December 1972 that Johnson's negotiators had said yes to in November 1968); not only that, we kept him in office in 1972 so he could continue his assault on the New Deal Society that had given more Americans more of what the "American Dream" was supposed to contain, an assault that has continued with every GOP pissant since Tricky Dicky, to provide us with the "wonderful life" we have today.
Seeing a photo yesterday of a protester carrying a sign "Don't Make Me Vote For Trump!" leads me to believe there's a significant number of them who are as stupid now as we non-voters were then.
In hindsight, student demonstrators were right about Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, apartheid and the Iraq War. They are right about the consequences of climate change. I don't endorse violence, intimidation, harassment or vandalism, but I do endorse students who are trying to figure out how the world works (and doesn't work) and how they fit into the picture. Using violence and force against peaceful protestors does not solve any problems. Your essay accurately challenges the views against the students and calls out some of the ridiculous analogies being offered up. Anyone who sees the world as Christopher Rufo does is automatically suspect in my book.
Yes
I wonder if we will ever get relief from the hegemony of right-wing ideology. I'm sick of having to live in a society where dumb, vile slop of the kind you dissect here has to be taken seriously, and is treated by almost everyone else as though it were a substantive contribution to political discourse. I want to live in the world of Chris Rufo, where leftists control everything instead of nothing.
I'd rather live in the world where Rufo was found this morning, face down in a dark alley.
Hell, I'd be okay living in the world where rufo never leaves the basement.
That'd work.
Would love to hear you discuss this on the podcast!
We are planning on recording early next week to discuss the campus protests and the reactions from across the political spectrum
In 1991 I was part of a group of students at the University of Notre Dame who protested the Persian Gulf War (World Peace Action Group). No violence, no police, pretty mild overall. But what I remember most vividly was that we tried to co-sponsor a protest/event with the non-sanctioned LGBT group on campus, and our Catholic university said that this was just a step too far. I applaud the student protestors--you are seeing something that is wrong and you are saying to your school, stop supporting what is so clearly wrong. Keep it up.
South Bend is my hometown. I lived on ND Avenue. Thanks for standing up in 1991. ND seems so different now--fewer Post Vatican 2 Catholics and more of the right wing kind.