College campus chaos

Two recent columns worth reading –

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/02/student-protesters-politics-democrats-tactics/

(Megan McArdle, Washington Post)

“When you’re trying to build sympathy for a cause, tactics matter. And most Americans think the most attention-grabbing tactics of the campus protesters — encampments, occupying public spaces or buildings, blocking traffic, and defacing property — are illegitimate.”

“[T]oday’s protests are challenging the coalition that grew out of the civil rights era, and the systems of laws and customs that coalition created for handling disputes. Neither those systems, nor that coalition, was designed to handle conflicts between two protected classes, such as Muslim and Jewish students. They always assumed a clean moral line between oppressed minorities and an oppressive majority. In the Gaza protests, the premise doesn’t hold.”

 

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/02/why-campus-chaos-should-give-democrats-ptsd-00155537

(Jeff Greenfield, Politico)

“New York City police, dressed in riot gear, descending on Columbia University, breaking up protests and arresting college students. It’s hard not to have flashbacks to 1968.”

“Most media retrospectives of the 1960s celebrate the marchers, the protests, the peace signs along with the compulsory Buffalo Springfield lyrics (“There’s something happening here/ But what it is ain’t exactly clear”). The reality is those upheavals were an enormous in-kind contribution to the political fortunes of the right. And if history comes even close to repeating itself, then the latest episode will redound to Donald Trump’s benefit.”

“The scenes of violence in Chicago outside the Democrats’ 1968 presidential convention, meanwhile, further contributed to the notion that left-wing lawlessness had gotten out of control. It was a nightmare event for Hubert Humphrey’s beleaguered presidential campaign, one where the public overwhelmingly sided with the Chicago police, not the demonstrators. (And, of course, guess where Democrats are holding their 2024 convention: Chicago.)”

“The political consequences of the [1968] upheaval became clear. While the doomed liberal campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy draw most of the focus in retrospectives of the era, the fact is that in November of 1968, Nixon and Wallace combined for 57 percent of the vote, close to the levels of historic landslide wins of LBJ in 1964 and Reagan in 1984.”