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.”
(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.”
