I think this is very astute on the thinking inside the senior executive suite at the university; thank you as always for your observations. Today it was the turn of my campus (google Indiana University tonight, and you will, literally, get the picture): a small, mild pro-Palestinian / pro-cease fire demo on the grounds that have been *dedicated* as a site for protest, but with a "no camping" provision. A few protestors set up tents, and so in came the state police in full riot gear and camo (for Indiana University?) a sniper on the rooftop of the union building, tactical helicopters, the works. Why this massive, rapid escalation? Well, as you point out, this is a red state (albeit one that signed into law a "protect free speech on campus" bit of legislation mere weeks ago). Institutional isomorphism across university leadership. And so much elite opinion talking about these sorts of responses as what the "grown ups in the room" do, though in my experience grown ups don't immediately rush to put on full combat outfits at the first sign of dissent.
I think the big change is the content of the protest, and how easily coopted it is. Previous protests of this ilk are either against a specific action or occurrence-- war in Iraq or investment in fossil fuels or apartheid in South Africa. And while there can be opposition to those concepts, they don't typically resonate. "The Iraq War is going great" wasn't a deeply held belief of very many people's, and not many people had a deep personal commitment to fossil fuel drilling outside of Exxon's C-suite.
The issue here is that there's a very real and nefarious antisemitic undercurrent to these protests. It doesn't appear to be a majority, and it largely seems to be outsiders, but, even setting aside the agitators yelling at Jewish students to "go back to Poland" and Zionists to die, you've got fairly mainstream (among the protesters) calls of "from the river to the sea" and such that, while not overtly and obviously antisemitic, often are, at best, indifferent to Jewish safety.
And that makes it fairly easy for the usual bad actors to lash out and demand that all of the protestors be punished, and garner way more support than they otherwise would. I have childhood friends of the mainstream Democratic sort who have decided that Columbia is an irredeemably antisemitic institution based on some of those videos. At that point, protestors find themselves having to exercise care across two dimensions-- focusing on making broadly resonant threats but also distancing themselves from those in their movement that do hold unsavory views and from outside agitators that poison their movement.
Failing to do so puts substantial pressure to bear on their movement that doesn't exist for things like anti-Iraq war or climate protests.
I question your history here somewhat. During the initial protests against the possibility of war in Iraq and the early war, the mainstream opinion was very much both "the Iraq War is going great" and "the Iraq War is profoundly necessary". Even *criticizing* the prospect of the war was depicted as simultaneously naive and unpatriotic, and not just by Republicans. We had a debate at Swarthmore between Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner and Wieseltier absolutely hammered Danner as a person who was absurdly prepared to allow Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons and deploy a nuclear bomb. (And he suggested that Danner and other critics were latent antisemites because they were specifically indifferent to the fate of Israel and thus uninterested in bringing Hussein to heel.) The early protests were roundly mocked and there were many calls for bringing the protesters to heel when they blocked traffic, etc.; many protesters were compared to John Walker Lindh and it was suggested they should share the same fate. You have to move ahead to 2007 or so before mainstream opinion turned markedly against the war--even in 2004 John Kerry plainly felt he couldn't even touch the issue except around the edges.
Paul Berman, notably, who was an intense enthusiast for the use of military force to spread liberalism through occupation, seems to have entirely forgotten his earlier advocacy of a failed war--and his scorn for the weakness of leftists who he believed were indifferent to illiberalism. He pulled the very same "no true Scotsman" stuff back in 2002-03--that the protesters of today are not that mighty breed of student activists who once had principles! principles! back in his day.
Many people opposing fossil fuel divestment argued at the least that radical reductions in fossil fuel usage were not plausible, and that protests were silly or impractical. But I think you're underestimating how many also opposed climate activism generally on the grounds that it would unemploy people, etc. and took the activists as a very personal and offensive danger to the lives and careers of people.
I'm also going to say that while I think all protests need to find ways to keep fringe thinkers and provocateurs out of their ranks--it can be an enormous headache to keep discipline on a broad popular movement in such a way that you put a leash on WTO-style anarchist participants--I also think this is a demand made most typically by concern trolls of various kinds who would never agree in a million years that such discipline has been achieved. They are not setting a standard with benchmarks at which point they will stop complaining--they would be just as outraged if one garbage can was overturned in a million-person march as they would if half the windows along the route were smashed. I'm particularly frustrated by people who call themselves "center-right" who claim that somehow they worked to get people out of the right after Charlottesville because that's just nonsense. The center-right has either snapped into line behind Trumpism after initially criticizing it, or it's been evicted from any political home whatsoever. A teeny fraction of a broad coalition doesn't get to claim that they exerted discipline over everybody else when the fact is that they got evicted by the undisciplined.
I would have recommended that anybody who genuinely wants to have an open mind go down to one of the protests only now that's going to be hard to do. I think they'd find that that the heart of things, the worst you'd find is naive, romantic or unthoughtful repetitions of slogans and a weak deployment of critical thinking about Hamas. Whatever is around the fringes of these protests is not under the control of students for the most part.
I don't judge SDS's political history by the Weathermen, even though I also think the historical relationship between the two is worth discussing as a tendency in almost all reformist political movements that are thwarted in their primary goals. I am frustrated that successive generations who have engaged in protest keep forgetting how they were criticized--or perhaps in some cases, rewrite how they criticized.
Certainly the Iraq War was super popular until it wasn't. But colleges were also far more prepared to stand behind their students in large part because the Leon Wiesltier view that protesters are latent antisemites was both not widespread and quite absurd. The difference here is that it's indisputable that there are antisemitic elements among the protesters. "Actually, 9/11 was good" was an almost nonexistent view on campus and elsewhere. "Actually 10/7 was good" certainly isn't the dominant protester message, but you don't have to look hard to find it, and that makes it trivially easy for your Elise Stefaniks and such to amplify it and use it to paint the protesters with a broad brush, and in turn to rile up both a significant chunk of fairly mainstream people and a not trivial number of powerful donors who can (and do) use their perch to impose personal and professional consequences on the protesters as a group.
Which is to say that the protesters this time should be far more conscious of how they curate their movement and who they allow in, both because of the mainstream support that they lose and because, frankly, they have unsavory people in their midst who poison their message. I'm generally highly critical of Netanyahu and Israel's occupation, and a proponent of ending the occupation of the West Bank and creation of a Palestinian state. But I wouldn't be joining these protests if I were on campus, in significant part because they're quite cavalier about including antisemites in their movement. That strikes me as a first for me.
I'm just curious about how you think students experiencing their first movement should perform acts of exclusion, especially on fellow students. In practice, that's really hard and it is often a thing that people learn only through experience. I cannot think of a left-leaning movement that hasn't been brutally hammered again and again by mainstream commentary about the people it allows to be associated with it. That is in fact the primal move of Cold War liberalism--it is where we got the phrase "fellow travellers"--liberals were always eager to red-bait, to call out "pinko" if someone in a movement had any Communist associations. The demand to police movements is what led a person with impeccable ethical commitments like Bayard Rustin to be pushed into the shadows of the civil rights movement--he was gay AND had Communist affiliations, so get him away from the respectables. (But use his insights nevertheless). This is an old move in the playbook: I will listen to you if you get rid of everyone I find distasteful! But the "I" in that case is insatiable: it will never run out of unacceptables.
It's hard in practice, but quite necessary. Because there is an objective element here. Communism might be, like libertarianism, a silly ideology, but it's not inherently hateful. There's objectively nothing wrong with being gay. There is something not just unsavory but dangerous about antisemitism. And drawing that distinction should be a first order priority. I think when it comes to building a movement, there is a certain "us or them" involved. For instance, I don't have any interest in making common cause with a labor union that systematically excludes black people, no matter how pro-labor my instincts, or with a protest movement that doesn't draw the line at calling mass murder of Jews a "historic win." Just because drawing the line can be difficult doesn't mean the line can't or shouldn't be drawn.
I think for people who were anti-Communists in the Cold War wasn't "a silly ideology"; they blamed it for mass death on a scale comparable to fascism. I think that's not an entirely unreasonable opinion if we're talking about "actually existing" state socialism in that era, and that's a view that eventually divided real leftists in very real ways. (Camus v. Sartre; Richard Wright v. Hansberry, etc.)
Drawing a line is difficult in practical terms: you need party-like structures and there are reasons why post-1965 leftists are uneasy about party-like structures--that practically defines "the New Left" on some level, and certainly defines BLM, Occupy, etc. Most social movements--left, right, and even 'center', whatever that might be in social movement terms--contain something dangerous. That in fact would be the point: a movement is arrayed against the way things are, and that will inevitably invite people with grievances who are dangerous but also will inevitably target someone who represents the status quo and feels threatened (legitimately) by the movement. It would be impossible to say "The present strategy of the Israeli government is profoundly unsustainable, and something fundamental about the premise of Israeli nationhood must change" without threatening someone who is 100% satisfied with the status quo or who wants the status quo to be intensified.
In practical terms, again, I really don't know what to tell students about how to kick someone out of their movement. Not the least because the reigning ideology on college campuses is to be inclusive. Up to the moment, inconsistently, that it isn't.
You're correct about the first part, but I think it fits into the same point about coalition building-- your movement has to be circumscribed in ways that are often zero sum. The notion of "Communism" itself in your example is broad enough that there's lots of room for maneuver. So if your movement is incorporating "Communists" who think private property should be collectively owned, but not those who think the bourgeoisie belong in gulags, you're drawing a meaningful distinction. Your hardened anticommunists might want to collapse that distinction, but pushing back on distinguishing between the two in that example is probably more worthwhile than insisting that tankies are a valued and integral part of your movement.
And while you're also correct that just about any meaningful social movement contains something line-toeing or dangerous (otherwise they wouldn't be controversial!), there is still a lot of value in taking to heart legitimate criticism while dismissing what isn't legitimate. In this case, there are lots of people doing their best to equate any criticism of Israel's behavior with antisemitism. It makes their job infinitely easier when the protest movement includes people and organizations celebrating October 7th (as Students for Justice in Palestine did), rejecting “all collaboration and dialogue with Zionist organizations” as “normalization,” and yelling at Jews to "go back to Poland."
The part of your response that I think I most object to is the idea that not kicking these groups out of a movement is any more "inclusive" than keeping them in. Whether they like it or not, there's a choice there. They can either kick out the groups that effectively declare that slaughter of Jews is good and "normalizing" 80-85% of Jews is bad, or they conclusively alienate people like me, who broadly agree that Israel's conduct of its war has crossed many lines into a humanitarian disaster, that its occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza need to end, but who are never going to join a movement that at the very least actively tolerates and at the worst accepts those with bigoted views toward us. The choice isn't kicking those people out of the movement or not kicking them out; it's between kicking them out and kicking us out.
I think this is very astute on the thinking inside the senior executive suite at the university; thank you as always for your observations. Today it was the turn of my campus (google Indiana University tonight, and you will, literally, get the picture): a small, mild pro-Palestinian / pro-cease fire demo on the grounds that have been *dedicated* as a site for protest, but with a "no camping" provision. A few protestors set up tents, and so in came the state police in full riot gear and camo (for Indiana University?) a sniper on the rooftop of the union building, tactical helicopters, the works. Why this massive, rapid escalation? Well, as you point out, this is a red state (albeit one that signed into law a "protect free speech on campus" bit of legislation mere weeks ago). Institutional isomorphism across university leadership. And so much elite opinion talking about these sorts of responses as what the "grown ups in the room" do, though in my experience grown ups don't immediately rush to put on full combat outfits at the first sign of dissent.
I think the big change is the content of the protest, and how easily coopted it is. Previous protests of this ilk are either against a specific action or occurrence-- war in Iraq or investment in fossil fuels or apartheid in South Africa. And while there can be opposition to those concepts, they don't typically resonate. "The Iraq War is going great" wasn't a deeply held belief of very many people's, and not many people had a deep personal commitment to fossil fuel drilling outside of Exxon's C-suite.
The issue here is that there's a very real and nefarious antisemitic undercurrent to these protests. It doesn't appear to be a majority, and it largely seems to be outsiders, but, even setting aside the agitators yelling at Jewish students to "go back to Poland" and Zionists to die, you've got fairly mainstream (among the protesters) calls of "from the river to the sea" and such that, while not overtly and obviously antisemitic, often are, at best, indifferent to Jewish safety.
And that makes it fairly easy for the usual bad actors to lash out and demand that all of the protestors be punished, and garner way more support than they otherwise would. I have childhood friends of the mainstream Democratic sort who have decided that Columbia is an irredeemably antisemitic institution based on some of those videos. At that point, protestors find themselves having to exercise care across two dimensions-- focusing on making broadly resonant threats but also distancing themselves from those in their movement that do hold unsavory views and from outside agitators that poison their movement.
Failing to do so puts substantial pressure to bear on their movement that doesn't exist for things like anti-Iraq war or climate protests.
I question your history here somewhat. During the initial protests against the possibility of war in Iraq and the early war, the mainstream opinion was very much both "the Iraq War is going great" and "the Iraq War is profoundly necessary". Even *criticizing* the prospect of the war was depicted as simultaneously naive and unpatriotic, and not just by Republicans. We had a debate at Swarthmore between Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner and Wieseltier absolutely hammered Danner as a person who was absurdly prepared to allow Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons and deploy a nuclear bomb. (And he suggested that Danner and other critics were latent antisemites because they were specifically indifferent to the fate of Israel and thus uninterested in bringing Hussein to heel.) The early protests were roundly mocked and there were many calls for bringing the protesters to heel when they blocked traffic, etc.; many protesters were compared to John Walker Lindh and it was suggested they should share the same fate. You have to move ahead to 2007 or so before mainstream opinion turned markedly against the war--even in 2004 John Kerry plainly felt he couldn't even touch the issue except around the edges.
Paul Berman, notably, who was an intense enthusiast for the use of military force to spread liberalism through occupation, seems to have entirely forgotten his earlier advocacy of a failed war--and his scorn for the weakness of leftists who he believed were indifferent to illiberalism. He pulled the very same "no true Scotsman" stuff back in 2002-03--that the protesters of today are not that mighty breed of student activists who once had principles! principles! back in his day.
Many people opposing fossil fuel divestment argued at the least that radical reductions in fossil fuel usage were not plausible, and that protests were silly or impractical. But I think you're underestimating how many also opposed climate activism generally on the grounds that it would unemploy people, etc. and took the activists as a very personal and offensive danger to the lives and careers of people.
I'm also going to say that while I think all protests need to find ways to keep fringe thinkers and provocateurs out of their ranks--it can be an enormous headache to keep discipline on a broad popular movement in such a way that you put a leash on WTO-style anarchist participants--I also think this is a demand made most typically by concern trolls of various kinds who would never agree in a million years that such discipline has been achieved. They are not setting a standard with benchmarks at which point they will stop complaining--they would be just as outraged if one garbage can was overturned in a million-person march as they would if half the windows along the route were smashed. I'm particularly frustrated by people who call themselves "center-right" who claim that somehow they worked to get people out of the right after Charlottesville because that's just nonsense. The center-right has either snapped into line behind Trumpism after initially criticizing it, or it's been evicted from any political home whatsoever. A teeny fraction of a broad coalition doesn't get to claim that they exerted discipline over everybody else when the fact is that they got evicted by the undisciplined.
I would have recommended that anybody who genuinely wants to have an open mind go down to one of the protests only now that's going to be hard to do. I think they'd find that that the heart of things, the worst you'd find is naive, romantic or unthoughtful repetitions of slogans and a weak deployment of critical thinking about Hamas. Whatever is around the fringes of these protests is not under the control of students for the most part.
I don't judge SDS's political history by the Weathermen, even though I also think the historical relationship between the two is worth discussing as a tendency in almost all reformist political movements that are thwarted in their primary goals. I am frustrated that successive generations who have engaged in protest keep forgetting how they were criticized--or perhaps in some cases, rewrite how they criticized.
Certainly the Iraq War was super popular until it wasn't. But colleges were also far more prepared to stand behind their students in large part because the Leon Wiesltier view that protesters are latent antisemites was both not widespread and quite absurd. The difference here is that it's indisputable that there are antisemitic elements among the protesters. "Actually, 9/11 was good" was an almost nonexistent view on campus and elsewhere. "Actually 10/7 was good" certainly isn't the dominant protester message, but you don't have to look hard to find it, and that makes it trivially easy for your Elise Stefaniks and such to amplify it and use it to paint the protesters with a broad brush, and in turn to rile up both a significant chunk of fairly mainstream people and a not trivial number of powerful donors who can (and do) use their perch to impose personal and professional consequences on the protesters as a group.
Which is to say that the protesters this time should be far more conscious of how they curate their movement and who they allow in, both because of the mainstream support that they lose and because, frankly, they have unsavory people in their midst who poison their message. I'm generally highly critical of Netanyahu and Israel's occupation, and a proponent of ending the occupation of the West Bank and creation of a Palestinian state. But I wouldn't be joining these protests if I were on campus, in significant part because they're quite cavalier about including antisemites in their movement. That strikes me as a first for me.
I'm just curious about how you think students experiencing their first movement should perform acts of exclusion, especially on fellow students. In practice, that's really hard and it is often a thing that people learn only through experience. I cannot think of a left-leaning movement that hasn't been brutally hammered again and again by mainstream commentary about the people it allows to be associated with it. That is in fact the primal move of Cold War liberalism--it is where we got the phrase "fellow travellers"--liberals were always eager to red-bait, to call out "pinko" if someone in a movement had any Communist associations. The demand to police movements is what led a person with impeccable ethical commitments like Bayard Rustin to be pushed into the shadows of the civil rights movement--he was gay AND had Communist affiliations, so get him away from the respectables. (But use his insights nevertheless). This is an old move in the playbook: I will listen to you if you get rid of everyone I find distasteful! But the "I" in that case is insatiable: it will never run out of unacceptables.
It's hard in practice, but quite necessary. Because there is an objective element here. Communism might be, like libertarianism, a silly ideology, but it's not inherently hateful. There's objectively nothing wrong with being gay. There is something not just unsavory but dangerous about antisemitism. And drawing that distinction should be a first order priority. I think when it comes to building a movement, there is a certain "us or them" involved. For instance, I don't have any interest in making common cause with a labor union that systematically excludes black people, no matter how pro-labor my instincts, or with a protest movement that doesn't draw the line at calling mass murder of Jews a "historic win." Just because drawing the line can be difficult doesn't mean the line can't or shouldn't be drawn.
I think for people who were anti-Communists in the Cold War wasn't "a silly ideology"; they blamed it for mass death on a scale comparable to fascism. I think that's not an entirely unreasonable opinion if we're talking about "actually existing" state socialism in that era, and that's a view that eventually divided real leftists in very real ways. (Camus v. Sartre; Richard Wright v. Hansberry, etc.)
Drawing a line is difficult in practical terms: you need party-like structures and there are reasons why post-1965 leftists are uneasy about party-like structures--that practically defines "the New Left" on some level, and certainly defines BLM, Occupy, etc. Most social movements--left, right, and even 'center', whatever that might be in social movement terms--contain something dangerous. That in fact would be the point: a movement is arrayed against the way things are, and that will inevitably invite people with grievances who are dangerous but also will inevitably target someone who represents the status quo and feels threatened (legitimately) by the movement. It would be impossible to say "The present strategy of the Israeli government is profoundly unsustainable, and something fundamental about the premise of Israeli nationhood must change" without threatening someone who is 100% satisfied with the status quo or who wants the status quo to be intensified.
In practical terms, again, I really don't know what to tell students about how to kick someone out of their movement. Not the least because the reigning ideology on college campuses is to be inclusive. Up to the moment, inconsistently, that it isn't.
You're correct about the first part, but I think it fits into the same point about coalition building-- your movement has to be circumscribed in ways that are often zero sum. The notion of "Communism" itself in your example is broad enough that there's lots of room for maneuver. So if your movement is incorporating "Communists" who think private property should be collectively owned, but not those who think the bourgeoisie belong in gulags, you're drawing a meaningful distinction. Your hardened anticommunists might want to collapse that distinction, but pushing back on distinguishing between the two in that example is probably more worthwhile than insisting that tankies are a valued and integral part of your movement.
And while you're also correct that just about any meaningful social movement contains something line-toeing or dangerous (otherwise they wouldn't be controversial!), there is still a lot of value in taking to heart legitimate criticism while dismissing what isn't legitimate. In this case, there are lots of people doing their best to equate any criticism of Israel's behavior with antisemitism. It makes their job infinitely easier when the protest movement includes people and organizations celebrating October 7th (as Students for Justice in Palestine did), rejecting “all collaboration and dialogue with Zionist organizations” as “normalization,” and yelling at Jews to "go back to Poland."
The part of your response that I think I most object to is the idea that not kicking these groups out of a movement is any more "inclusive" than keeping them in. Whether they like it or not, there's a choice there. They can either kick out the groups that effectively declare that slaughter of Jews is good and "normalizing" 80-85% of Jews is bad, or they conclusively alienate people like me, who broadly agree that Israel's conduct of its war has crossed many lines into a humanitarian disaster, that its occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza need to end, but who are never going to join a movement that at the very least actively tolerates and at the worst accepts those with bigoted views toward us. The choice isn't kicking those people out of the movement or not kicking them out; it's between kicking them out and kicking us out.