Democrats not looking for protesters’ support

The past few weeks have tested many progressive theories of protest and politics and have found them mostly wanting, as many college administrators and a growing number of Democrats have taken a harsher line against the protesters’ encampments.

Start with the theories held by the protesters about how they are helping the Palestinian people.

One is that, if they can force universities to cut ties with Israeli institutions, including divesting their endowments from companies connected to Israel, the resulting economic pressure will force Israel’s government to change its policies. As I noted in a previous column, this is unlikely. The specific sums involved are too small to influence the behavior of corporations, much less a country.

Alternatively, the protests could mobilize public opinion against Israel by calling attention to the suffering it has inflicted in Gaza. Certainly, the demonstrations have attracted a lot of attention, but it doesn’t help to garner publicity in ways that make people dislike you. People paid a lot of attention in the late 1960s, too, when peaceful protests became steadily more violent and disruptive. As a result, many previously supportive voters switched to law-and-order politicians who promised to control the chaos.

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.

Some protesters are aware of this, of course, and will retort that they aren’t trying to appeal to Joe Sixpack. Rather, they’re appealing to influential sympathizers in powerful positions — college administrators, congressional staffers, the White House — who won’t dare risk the anger of young voters. But this theory rests on wrong assumptions.

One is the belief, common in progressive circles, that Democrats can win big by turning out young voters by moving left on various issues and exciting those voters enough to get them out to the polls. This belief isn’t wholly unfounded: Young voters are more likely than older ones to favor Democrats and progressive positions. Unfortunately, they’re also less likely to vote.

Generations of progressive strategists have nonetheless been dazzled by visions of the enormous coalition they could build if young voters would just turn out to vote as readily as retirees do. But there’s a reason these visions keep failing to materialize. When you ask young voters what they care about most, bread-and-butter issues such as inflation, health care and jobs top the list, while progressive priorities such as climate change, student loan forgiveness and Israel-Palestine are at the bottom. Moreover, this is especially true of young voters who don’t vote regularly: “at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters,” political analyst Matt Yglesias writes.

So, no, President Biden doesn’t need to cater to the campus protesters to build his coalition for November. Moreover, he can’t afford to, and neither can college administrators, for reasons that are obvious once you discard yet another false assumption undergirding campus protest culture: that a commitment to civil rights would ultimately force the leaders of left-wing institutions to take their side.

That’s long been a reasonably safe assumption, which is why so many students now seem palpably bewildered as the administrations who once rewarded them for writing college essays about their activism have suddenly started cracking down. But just as the student protests of 1968 broke apart the New Deal coalition, today’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.

Now, anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, and you can certainly want the war to end without hating Jewish people. But rage against Israeli policy sometimes shades into rage against the Israelis who support it, and then into rage against the majority of American Jews who also support the current war and, occasionally, into outright conspiracy theories about Jewish power. In the heat of protest, these blurry lines have been crossed multiple times.

College administrators can’t meet this with the same policy of benign neglect they might adopt toward any other left-wing protest, even one that violates rules about, say, occupying common spaces and excluding fellow students. Unlike chants of “Abolish the police,” chants about expelling “Zionist” students from your “liberated zone” invites political scrutiny, donor revolts and lawsuits from Jewish students. Democratic politicians can’t wave all this away as youthful exuberance for a righteous cause.

Protesters who obviously failed to account for this key difference have deployed the same disruptive tactics that previously won sympathy for campus activists from Democratic politicians and concessions from friendly college administrators. Out of solidarity, they have, as often, failed to adequately police the more offensive elements on their own side. Only this time, the results have been disastrous.

Columbia University’s administration suspended protesters who refused to leave their tent city, then called in police after the protesters stormed a building, smashing windows and shoving their fellow students aside. UCLA was belatedly swarmed by the Los Angeles Police Department after the university’s encampment degenerated into an hourslong brawl between protesters and counterprotesters. Many Democrats, as well as the White House, issued unequivocal condemnations of illiberal tactics and antisemitism.

I have sympathy for the protesters, who clearly want to help the people of Gaza and clearly didn’t understand why their customary routines might produce different, and worse, results. But if they truly care about their cause, then they need a better theory of politics and protest, and a more effective set of tactics when they put those theories into practice.