The Students Have Never Been the Enemy

Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about

Has there ever been a student protest movement that wasn’t immediately derided by the political center and mainstream elite opinion as too radical, deluded, misguided, counter-productive, and dangerous?

That is certainly the prevailing opinion yet again, as a nation-wide Pro-Palestinian protest movement has emerged. Since the situation escalated due to the decision by the leadership of Columbia University to call the police on their own students in mid-April, basically all of the nation’s leading columnists, commentators, and pundits who, I believe it is fair to say, position themselves anywhere from center-right to center-left have chimed in to express their disdain for the students. On Monday, Washington Post columnist Max Boot joined the fray to come down hard on what he calls the “revolutionary cosplay” at campuses, on the ideological extremism and ugly antisemitism he is diagnosing – the students, Boot concludes, are either dangerous radicals and/or in it purely for the “thrill” and therefore profoundly unserious.

To provide evidence for his assessment, Boot quotes from a manifesto from Columbia University Apartheid Divest and from the National Students for Justice in Palestine website – both of which, we are to believe, are indicative of what defines these protests. I want to be very explicit about the fact that I am not defending what is written in these sources. I don’t think Boot is particularly even-handed in his critique and certainly, at all times, chooses the most uncharitable interpretation possible to make his point: He criticizes these documents for condemning Israel’s war in Gaza but not the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Kim Jong Un’s reign in North Korea, for instance, which is a rather weird point to make, as the students are not staging a vague “Peace on Earth” festival, but a protest directed at U.S. institutions and the U.S. government which, correct me if I am wrong, aren’t currently supporting Putin or the guy in Pyongyang. The fact remains, however, that there is indeed, to use Boot’s term, some ugly stuff here. The website presents Mao and Lenin as fellow fighters against “bourgeois democracy,” and whatever problems there are with the existing system, I certainly have no sympathies for these particular historical figures, their regimes, or people who mythologize and idolize them.

The problem is, however, that Boot’s argument and characterization of the student protesters still does not hold up. Boot went looking for the most radical voices, found what he was looking for, and now insists we must define the protests by these most extreme manifestations. Let’s at least acknowledge that this is certainly not how mainstream published opinion has approached protests that are coded as rightwing rather than leftwing. The past fifteen years or so have provided ample evidence of how we are actually asked to do the opposite: Tea Party, Trump rallies, Trucker convoys – we are asked to look for the least incriminating interpretation, to endlessly invest in finding an explanation that does not foreground racism and white supremacy, that focuses instead on economic anxiety or on people understandably being frustrated with the arrogant elites who left them behind.  

Boot’s argument is also just not very plausible even on its own terms. Let’s try to think through what we should expect from these protests if the political and ideological leanings of a significant percentage of the students were adequately represented by the sources on which Boot focuses: Setting up tents? Congregating on university lawns to be arrested en masse without any resistance to the police? Well, these radical Communist revolutionaries seem pretty… tame?

That’s what is so utterly disproportionate and untethered (dare I say: hysterical) about the elite mainstream response: David Frum says it’s just like Weimar – but Germany in the early 1930s, right before Hitler’s ascension to power, saw constant mass violence in the streets, which is simply not happening. Caitlin Flanagan called the occupation of a university building “Kristallnacht on the Hudson,” using a term that (euphemistically) refers to the November pogrom of 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 – yet the students haven’t seriously hurt, let alone killed anyone, as the violence has emanated almost exclusively from the armed agents of the state. Thomas Chatterton Williams compared the students to the January 6 insurrectionists – only they are not actually taking any initiative to overthrow the government or threatening to kill elected officials.

The suggestion that a significant portion of these students are radical militants is simply not plausible, therefore. That leaves the “cosplaying” interpretation Boot offers (without ever really reconciling it with the assertion that we are looking at extreme ideologues). But if this is all just kids *pretending* to do revolution for the thrill of it, how does that possibly justify this kind of response from authorities and centrist opinionists alike?

What about, finally, the explanation for what could be animating most of these students that is most in line with what they all claim: That they are objecting – morally and politically – to the way Israel is conducting this war because of the enormous suffering it has inflicted upon innocent civilians, with absolutely no end in sight? And would you believe it, in the second-to-last paragraph, Boot does indeed offer this:

“Granted, most of the rank-and-file demonstrators probably are not Marxist revolutionaries. Many probably are not even Hamas supporters. Most, I imagine, are simply well-meaning young people who are understandably troubled by all the suffering caused by Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza.”

Well-meaning young people, understandably troubled. My biggest frustration with the mainstream discourse is the fact that over and over again, these commentators make the conscious decision to *not* foreground this fundamental reality about the protests, but to obscure it by focusing on the most extreme manifestations and voices. And they never stop to grapple with the fact that the approach they choose would have delegitimized – and was invariably used to delegitimize – every major protest movement in history, very much including the ones that polite society today likes to affirm and claim as examples of the *good* protest.

This whole “dangerous student radicals” discourse is a disaster for the country. What good could possibly come from large chunks of a society turning against not just the institutions, but the very idea of higher education? Trust in college is at a historic low – a development that has so far been mostly driven by Republicans declaring professors, students, and everyone else associated with the university the enemy of “real” America. Now opinion leaders on the center are also propagating this idea of the campus as a stronghold of extremism, an incubator of dangerous radicalism, a place where young people are being indoctrinated. All of this is conditioning ever bigger slices of society to fear and despise the younger generation, it amplifies and exacerbates inter-generational tension.

In the process, American society is depriving itself of a desperately needed corrective – because that is what student movements have historically provided: They consistently reminded mainstream America that it was falling drastically short of its own aspirations and helped amplify the criticism and demands of marginalized groups who have always fought for their equality. The university has acted not so much as a hotbed of extremism, but as an environment that allowed young people to formulate an unsparing critique of America’s shortcomings and the injustices at home and abroad it ignored or actively perpetuated. The core message emanating from student movements has always been: We demand you do better! Because we should do better.

The ghost of 1968

The 1960s – and especially the events of the year 1968 – loom large in the collective imaginary of mainstream America. Campus unrest, Columbia University occupied in the spring, a high-stakes presidential election in November… and the Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago, just like in August 1968, when the DNC was overshadowed by mass protests and violence in the streets.

Commentators, unsurprisingly, are emphasizing the “glaring similarity,” as Max Boot puts it, between 1968 and our current situation: “In both cases, the protesters’ ideological and behavioral excesses undermine the very causes for which they fight.” Others have gone even further to suggest, like George Packer does, a direct line of leftwing radicalism from the student protests of 1968 to today, as leftwing radicals supposedly put an end to the “ideal of the liberal university” when they took over the institution as professors and administrators and turned to indoctrinating every generation since, preaching dangerously subversive leftist critical theory. In any case, in this interpretation, 1968 is invoked to lend more credence to the idea that we are currently looking at a destructive uprising, as young people are – yet again! – giving in to irrational impulses. Heed the warning of the past: These protests must be quelled, order must be restored.

What if that is not actually the lesson of 1968, however? What if the “history” that is being presented here is merely perpetuating the contemporaneous disdain – a particular story of the past weaponized in service of legitimizing present-day elite anxieties? What if we dare to investigate (rather than demonize) the history of the 1968 protests and explore (rather than seek to delegitimize) their motivations and demands? There is a different story to be told about the history of student protests, about the legacy and lessons of 1968. It is much more accurate diagnostically, and it also suggests a way forward that seems a lot more constructive than American mainstream society denouncing and devouring its own children.

What has entered our collective memory and imaginary as “1968” was the culmination of student-led protests that erupted in around 60 countries around the globe at the same time. This was a truly global phenomenon: The university was the epicenter of mass protests in the mid- to late-1960s in most Western societies, but also some countries that belonged to Eastern Bloc as well as in over 30 countries of the Global South. Student protests shook the establishment not just in the United States, France, and West Germany, but also in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia as well as in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina; in Senegal, Ethiopia, and South Africa; in Turkey, India, or Indonesia. There was evidently a lot of frustration and revolutionary energy around at the time, and those who protested certainly perceived of themselves as part of a global movement.

These protests had country-specific origins and contexts – but there are some really striking transnational parallels and similarities. The key actors, those at the center of the protests, were part of a younger generation that had come of age after the Second World War. Almost without exception, the “unrest” originated at the campus and spread from there. No matter where we look, we find students animated by a deeply felt sense of frustration, disillusionment, and disappointment – by a longing to overcome a status quo they regarded as hypocritical, as they were convinced the elites in power were betraying the ideals and promises they constantly invoked to perpetuate and legitimize the existing system.

The particular sense of anger and frustration had a variety of sources and causes. In Senegal, for instance, students pointed to the promise of independence from colonial rule that stood in contrast with the reality of continued cultural and economic dependence on France. Here, “1968” was a post-colonial conflict. In Egypt, the frustration resulted from the gap between the Nasser regime’s promises of “development,” of modernizing the country – and the fact that the social and economic circumstances had remained dire for most Egyptians. A similar dynamic provided the context for student protests in Brazil or India.

If we zoom in on the “West,” it was the frustration over the gap between the promise of liberal democracy and the reality of a society and political system that certainly was quite democratic for some groups and something else entirely for others. Protesters in North America in Western Europe perceived of their own actions as a leftwing political project, they tended to formulate their frustration with the existing order in Marxist terms, and a critique of capitalism was a key element of their worldview.

The gap between promises and proclamations on the one hand and existing power relations on the other was particularly stark in the United States, where “All men are created equal” contrasted violently with the reality of a racial caste society that was only just beginning to dismantle white supremacist apartheid rule in the South. A global superpower that was presenting itself on the world stage as the oldest democracy in existence and a beacon of freedom for people everywhere was, in reality, evidently not a society in which the individual’s status was no longer determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth.

They may have been chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” when they were marching in the streets, but the idea that such slogans were indicative of an “anti-American” movement still misses the point. It was a way for protesters to signal frustration with and distance themselves from the status quo; and it was certainly intended to shock those in power. But the students were not rejecting the ideals America had always claimed as its defining essence – they were demanding the country finally live up to them. It was the anger over “the gap between potential and realization in this society” that animated the protests, as the Columbia Strike Coordinating Committee (SCC), which had formed to represent the striking students and was dominated by members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), proclaimed in the fall of 1968. The central demand that spoke to the generational frustrations of millions and convinced them to march and protest even if they had nothing much to do with the inner circle of SDS student activism was to close that gap, to end the hypocrisy, to finally realize the promise of American democracy.

A rather dramatic shift in how this younger generation perceived of the world formed the basis for their political engagement: Whereas their parents and those in positions of power may have been content with measuring the present-day reality against previous eras in American history – the height of Jim Crow perhaps, or the depths of the Great Depression – the students insisted on measuring it against the explicitly stated promises of the post-war order. Growth and relative stability, socio-economically and politically, was widely regarded across the “West” as evidence of success and progress – and it undoubtedly was, when compared with the upheavals of the 1930s and the cataclysms of total war. But a younger generation was no longer willing to accept that as the only standard. They pointed not only to the ideals formulated in the U.S. constitution, but also to all the talk about democracy and freedom by which the West liked to define itself amidst the Cold War struggle. Their unwillingness to accept “better than it used to be” as a sufficient legitimization for the status quo has always been turned against student protest movements: Why do they deny progress? But let’s remember that “better than it used to be” (and you better be grateful for it!) has been leveraged against progressive demands at all times – very much including those times that everyone outside the most reactionary corners of society agrees were abhorrent and nowhere near good enough.

Why did these protests erupt right at this moment in the late 1960s and in so many different political, social, and cultural contexts? If we are looking for an explanatory model that is able to cover more than just the United States or the West and might serve as a framework for “1968” as a global phenomenon, it’s worth starting with the obvious: The generational aspect. In the 1960s, a new generation was coming of age, a generation that, in the Global North, no longer considered the Global Depression or the Second World War as its defining experiences. In the Global South, the most important transformation was decolonization – the rapid dissolution of the European colonial empires in most parts of the world. Here, the student protesters were the first generation that came of age not as subjects of foreign empire, but as citizens of an independent nation. These transformations made the 1960s into the decade of grand expectations.

It is certainly fair to note that, at least in the West, this type of activism was only possible on the basis of an unprecedented socio-economic stability and prosperity from which many students benefited – and against the backdrop of a democratization and liberalization that didn’t originate with the students: They channeled those larger trends, hoped to act as a catalyst. And they benefited from fact that Western societies had moved past the most extreme excesses of anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, now allowing for a little more room for domestic dispute and critique from the Left.

Finally, in so many places, the Vietnam War functioned as the conditio sine qua non. Young people all across the West – and far beyond – pointed to the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam as irrefutable proof of the hypocrisies of the existing system. America was promising freedom, equality, and democracy – while supporting an authoritarian regime in a far-away land that had little support in its own population; America was sending its own children to die, a disproportionate percentage of them young men of color who were asked to kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands for “freedom”: A freedom they had always been denied at home. The Vietnam War provided the spark for mass protest and widespread rebellion.

What is the legacy – the “lesson” – of 1968?

Students were at the forefront of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, against support for the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s, against the Iraq War in the early 2000s. All of these protest movements were, at the time, unpopular in mainstream America, seen as manifestations of leftwing radicalism, and often derided as “anti-American.” But the students were right – right to protest foreign interventions or support for foreign regimes, right to criticize America’s role as morally and politically disastrous.

It does not follow from this pattern that all left-coded student protesters are inevitably correct in their diagnosis and always justified in all the actions they take – or that all their specific demands are necessarily helpful and constructive. It is true that in some corners of the Left, there is a reflexive impulse to deny that anything antisemitic is ever said or done at these pro-Palestinian protests. This type of denial is not only morally disingenuous, but also politically ruinous. Antisemitism does not have an inherent political valence, it is present across the political spectrum. The Left – and anyone who cares about the plight of the people in Gaza – should come down hard on those who see these protests as an opportunity to display their vile hatred.

But at this point, it is an eminently reasonable demand that we all grapple earnestly with the role large student protest movements have consistently played in recent U.S. history: As a necessary corrective, a thorn in the side of elites who were too blind, too complacent, or too complicit to see that America was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations, at home and abroad.

The students are consistently enabled to play that role because they come together in an environment in which they get the time and resources to think critically about society and creatively about potential ways to make the world a better place – and they are not yet too jaded or too exhausted to believe this might actually happen: We could really make the world a better place.

Isn’t that naïve and silly? All this rebelling, being loud, refusing to comply – isn’t it all just post-adolescent “cosplay”? I’m actually willing to concede that the uncompromising nature of student protests has certain similarities to the way teenagers sometimes react with withering contempt and utter revulsion to the normal hypocrisies of everyday adult life. But is that such a bad thing? Yes, of course, compromises have to be made, alliances have to be accepted, politics is all about trade-offs, and it’s probably not helpful to define electoral choices as moral commitments… I promise you, most of these students understand all this very clearly. But they have decided that at this very moment, those are not the only concerns that guide their actions. Yes, there is a historically important election coming in November, and the fact that they have very little regard – and even less patience – for electoral concerns is often brought up as evidence of how irrational and unserious the students supposedly are: “the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution” to the Trump campaign, Max Boot says. But let’s also acknowledge that it is precisely the fact that the students are not yet conditioned to filter everything through the lens of partisan realpolitik, that they refuse to let electoralism be the alpha and omega of their politics, that enables them to serve as a sensor and a corrective. Student movements have joined and have been at the forefront of every social justice cause – a key ally for marginalized, oppressed groups in their struggle for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights… not in spite of the way they approach society and reject realpolitik, but because of it.

You know who actually, kind of, a little bit, begrudgingly agrees that student protest movements tend to be proven right by history: The same centrist pundits who are imploring us to view these particular students today as deranged radicals. “The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters,” George Packer wrote – while decrying a vast leftist conspiracy and indoctrination campaign. “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,” Max Boot concedes. Remarkably, however, these authors never allow this rather profound realization to affect their assessment or attitude towards the current protests. Packer simply ignores the question of how to reconcile his main argument – that the 60s protesters were extremists propagating extremist theories – with the fact that they were, by his own admission, correct in their diagnosis and demands. Boot addresses this tension – by shifting the focus quickly to the supposedly disastrous consequences of their “extreme tactics” that “often backfired.” A rather simplistic assumption of cause and effect – the students protested, which caused Nixon to win the election – is fueling such statements. And it is rather telling how much the goalposts are being moved here: From a substantive argument about the ideology behind the protests to one about political effectiveness.

It is certainly true that the electoral consequences of large-scale protests are uncertain, and it is rather unlikely that the students will achieve all their specific political goals, especially the more radical ones. However, a more holistic assessment of the historical significance of student protests and of the “lessons” 1968 might offer would do well to distinguish the question of immediate, narrowly defined electoral outcomes from the underlying diagnosis and discontent that brought students together. Whatever happened afterwards hardly invalidated the core demand to correct course in a situation in which the gulf between the nation’s professed ideals and its immediate actions had simply become unbearable.

I hesitate to call previous student protest movements the conscience of the nation, as there is never just one group that functions as such an entity. But if we seek to understand why young people are spending so much time and effort, why they are accepting considerable risk to their health and their careers, we must understand why they regard it a question of conscience (much more so than ideology) to join the protests. The general attitude of disdain and condescension towards the protests that is currently prevailing in elite opinion makes too many commentators blind to how serious these students are. We are asked to see them as either ideological extremists or cosplaying children – and so we should expect them to either become terrorists or soon get bored and go home to enjoy their summer. A similar story is often told about 1968. But the vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t end up in the terrorist underground or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures to make the world a better place – because they truly believed that a course correction was desperately needed. The new social movements of the 70s – movements, activist groups, and NGOs focusing on environmental concerns, gender equality, and human rights, for instance – were all fueled by the energies of the student revolt. Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have a lot to do with that. The American Right disdains all of that and is defined by its desire to turn the clock back to well before the 1960s. Their hatred for the student protesters, past and present, is at least consistent in that sense. But claiming to affirm and celebrate past progress while aggressively denouncing the young people who were instrumental in reminding the nation that a course correction was needed and then poured so much into trying to make that happen: That’s rather disingenuous.