Thomas Zimmer: The Students Have Never Been the Enemy

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the

Has there ever been a student protest movement that wasn’t immediately derided by the political center and mainstream elite opinion as too radical, deluded, misguided, counter-productive, and dangerous?

That is certainly the prevailing opinion yet again, as a nation-wide Pro-Palestinian protest movement has emerged. Since the situation escalated due to the decision by the leadership of Columbia University to call the police on their own students in mid-April, basically all of the nation’s leading columnists, commentators, and pundits who, I believe it is fair to say, position themselves anywhere from center-right to center-left have chimed in to express their disdain for the students. On Monday, Washington Post columnist Max Boot joined the fray to come down hard on what he calls the “revolutionary cosplay” at campuses, on the ideological extremism and ugly antisemitism he is diagnosing – the students, Boot concludes, are either dangerous radicals and/or in it purely for the “thrill” and therefore profoundly unserious.

To provide evidence for his assessment, Boot quotes from a manifesto from Columbia University Apartheid Divest and from the National Students for Justice in Palestine website – both of which, we are to believe, are indicative of what defines these protests. I want to be very explicit about the fact that I am not defending what is written in these sources. I don’t think Boot is particularly even-handed in his critique and certainly, at all times, chooses the most uncharitable interpretation possible to make his point: He criticizes these documents for condemning Israel’s war in Gaza but not the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Kim Jong Un’s reign in North Korea, for instance, which is a rather weird point to make, as the students are not staging a vague “Peace on Earth” festival, but a protest directed at U.S. institutions and the U.S. government which, correct me if I am wrong, aren’t currently supporting Putin or the guy in Pyongyang. The fact remains, however, that there is indeed, to use Boot’s term, some ugly stuff here. The website presents Mao and Lenin as fellow fighters against “bourgeois democracy,” and whatever problems there are with the existing system, I certainly have no sympathies for these particular historical figures, their regimes, or people who mythologize and idolize them.

The problem is, however, that Boot’s argument and characterization of the student protesters still does not hold up. Boot went looking for the most radical voices, found what he was looking for, and now insists we must define the protests by these most extreme manifestations. Let’s at least acknowledge that this is certainly not how mainstream published opinion has approached protests that are coded as rightwing rather than leftwing. The past fifteen years or so have provided ample evidence of how we are actually asked to do the opposite: Tea Party, Trump rallies, Trucker convoys – we are asked to look for the least incriminating interpretation, to endlessly invest in finding an explanation that does not foreground racism and white supremacy, that focuses instead on economic anxiety or on people understandably being frustrated with the arrogant elites who left them behind.

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