Last spring’s college protests over the war in Gaza saw similarly unrealistic demands issued to both the Biden administration and college administrators. And, as with the 1970 student strike, the demands of today’s student protesters have gone mostly unheeded. Congressional Republicans and university donors have even orchestrated a purge of college presidents accused of coddling protesters. Defying the apocalyptic rhetoric of some protesters, campuses have opened up again with a return to normal academic life and stricter rules regarding student demonstrations.
Writing in the New York Times, the Princeton University sociologist Zeynep Tufekci is perplexed by this turn of events, lamenting—as her essay’s title puts it—“How the Powerful Outmaneuvered the American Protest Movement.” Nevertheless, she claims that “big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history.” Really? Tufekci cites the civil-rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington as examples of how mass protest can galvanize political change. But she does not provide other persuasive examples of success. Indeed, she can be equivocal in assessing the value of such protests, conceding “they didn’t change the world that much.” I think there’s a reason for that: mass protests are usually an expression of political powerlessness and social anonymity, not burgeoning political influence. The protests I participated in proved stunningly futile, while giving us a false sense of moral seriousness that eventually turned to disillusionment. Yes, the draft was ended, but the war in Vietnam dragged on for another five years. Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972 after campaigning against the antiwar movement and the permissive youth counterculture. That resounding electoral defeat was a harbinger of the cultural backlash unleashed by the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s, with its economic libertarianism and even fiercer Cold War policies.
Tufekci, who has a romantic view of campuses “aflame in anger and conflict,” ends her essay wanly, noting the apparent futility of the protests, especially given challenges presented by social media, but hoping for a better outcome in the future. “Mass demonstrations of dissent” are vital to democracy, she writes. Perhaps. “Each generation needs to creatively, purposefully find its own way,” she writes. “I can’t wait to see what this generation comes up with.” So far, what the current generation seems to have come up with is not any different from what my generation came up with.