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Columbia has learnt the wrong lesson of 1968 Today's students are little more than a patchy historical shadow

'It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968' (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

'It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968' (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images)


May 9, 2024   6 mins

The barricades. The passion. The patchouli. A campus protest and student rebellion that threatens to engulf a tired establishment. This time round, the police used flash-bang grenades rather than tear gas to clear out Hamilton Hall. But this is a detail, not a difference, and the parallels between 1968 and 2024 on the Columbia University campus are obvious. The historical rhymes extend well beyond such surface symbolism. Outraged by racism and injustice at home, protesters have coalesced around a foreign war. Like the New Left before them, Zoomers refuse to be “Good Germans”. More broadly, they oppose what to their minds is a racist, fascist, and imperialist system. Meanwhile, a bland Democratic institutionalist watches his re-election prospects wither. His wily, law-and-order foe senses opportunity.

It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968. And this is no coincidence — many of the protesters see themselves as revivalists, resurrecting the pose and the politics of a more heroic era. But a closer examination of the trajectory of the 1968 generation reveals the Columbia crop to be little more than a patchy historical shadow. Because while the 2024 generation are ultimately the grandchildren of 1968, they are also its epigones, and placing the two political movements side by side is an object lesson in the difference between the authentic and ersatz.

Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 Columbia University protests, was a typical New Leftist. He entered college from the mid-Sixties middle class — apolitical, yet vaguely jaundiced. He longed for an “intellectual avant-garde”. He had tired of watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold from the side-lines. He drifted in such frustrations until discovering Malcolm X who taught him that “the division in the world is between the oppressed—who are mainly people of color—and the oppressors—who are mainly white”. In a phrase, this is how Rudd and the New Leftists could link their domestic situation to Vietnam and American foreign policy.

This was key to turning the Civil Rights movement into a larger New Left. The batons, German shepherds, and firehoses that the racist South used as its weapons had already permanently changed how Rudd, and many in his generation, viewed their country. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and the student wing of the civil rights movement served as their activist model. Their villain was George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who was taken to define America at home. Once Vietnam was thrown into the mix, New Leftists could think of their nation as George Wallace home and abroad — racist, fascist, and irredeemably imperialist.

This 21st-century movement opts for a similar synthesis, tying their Gaza activism to their anti-racist background. Like the original New Left, the culture war over American society in the last decade has led them on a journey from racial optimism to remorseless antagonism. It began with Barack Obama, the Zoomer John Kennedy. Charismatic and cool, Obama symbolised an ascendant “post-racial” America when the nation could still believe in change through traditional political channels. But Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, Michael Brown’s 2014 shooting, and the Ferguson Riots began to punch holes in this fantasy before, like the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Donald Trump’s election and George Floyd, radicalised a generation.

Once at college, the institutional pressures were there to bake these ingredients into a very 1968 mould: the 2024 student protesters sound and act like the New Left because they are trained by an institutionalised New Left at elite universities. This is why the intone the very same language and misapply identical principles. In 1968, Rudd founded his protest upon Columbia’s “racism and support for imperialism”. Now, 56 years later, Jawuanna McAllister a Cornell University student protester defines her philosophy: “we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist… none of us can be free… unless all of us are free”. It’s Freaky Friday — the student protest edition, except this time there is no generation gap on campus.

But though they imbibe and spout the same ideas, the modern protest movement dwells in a completely different context to its grandparent. In the Sixties, elite colleges and universities were institutionally conservative: the University of California even prohibited all political activity on campus. It was that total (and unreasonable) prohibition which prompted the original free-speech movement. At Columbia meanwhile, Mark Rudd sipped sherry with “tame and bloodless” professors in dreary afternoon seminars on Aristotle. At Swarthmore, future Weather Underground leaders Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin endured curfews, dined on white tablecloths, and organised formal dinners.

Today, these very same campuses actively market themselves as Left-wing activist finishing schools. Cornell’s student union features a plaque commemorating armed takeover of the building in 1969. At Atlanta’s Emory University, Arts and Social Justice Fellows help students translate their learning into “creative activism in the name of social justice”. And Columbia, which is euphemistically called “Protest Ivy”, brings activist alumni to campus to woo potential students, while its two-semester core “Contemporary Civilization” is effectively a reading list for the 2024 activists. On the list are as many texts on the Haitian Constitution (three) as there are on the American, while the post-1945 readings are devoted exclusively to anticolonialism, race, sex and gender, and climate change. Unlike the Boomers who lived in a conservative social milieu amid establishment liberal ideas, the Zoomers scarcely encounter any contemporary notion to the Right of the Combahee River Collective or Frantz Fanon.

And this gets at the heart of the crucial difference between 2024 and 1968. Rudd, and his contemporaries, rebelled. Their movement, and its excesses, were born amid social upheaval and intellectual ferment. This certainly resulted in some misjudged actions and overheated rhetoric: when I interviewed Rudd, he freely admitted this. But one can understand, if not always defend, the New Left’s actions because of the scale of the political context. They imagined themselves battling racist oppression at home and imperialism abroad — because they were. In 1963, George Wallace had vowed to preserve segregation forever. Selma’s Bloody Sunday was a current event. Western imperialism was a present-day fact. What LBJ saw as the domino theory in Vietnam was instead a final act in Vietnam’s decades-long quest for independence, which America was denying through its war.

This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden. Protesters fundamentally misunderstand the very injustices they protest. And, trained by the old-New Left, they see American racism as frozen in 1968 amber, even though the material basis for racial inequality has fundamentally shifted. In 1968, to be black was to be in the American underclass: in 1960, only 10% of African Americans held a middle-class job. But the very victories of Civil Rights have changed that equation.

William Julius Wilson, the preeminent urban sociologist of his era, finds that class has become stickier than race in determining life chances. For the half of all black families that are now middle-class as a result, this is good news. And though they still suffer the worst, working-class African Americans are the victims of the same globalised economy as their white and brown brethren. There has not been a complete revolution: drive along any of America’s 955 Martin Luther King Boulevards and you will see reasons for pessimism. African-American men are still disproportionately victims of police violence. But this no longer a product of racialised legislation, but of the fact that poor Americans, of all races, are the disproportionate victims of a militarised police state.

“It is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole”

And in several ways this is worse than 1968. Because this time it is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole. Benjamin Netanyahu can more easily ignore shrill exaggerations: the war grinds on; Palestinians suffer. The Zoomer Left hasn’t responded to this reality — it doesn’t even try. Instead, it sets about exemplifying Rob Henderson’s luxury belief motif, where anti-war activism confers social prestige on the educated elite. The cultural geography of the current protests is equally telling in this regard. These protests are stationed at elite campuses, the “Ivy plus” institutions where children of elites predominate. The New Left admittedly started with upper-middle-class kids at elite schools. But hundreds of middle-class state colleges eventually erupted in protest. In 1970, normie Kent State University in Ohio became the symbol of a mass youth rebellion.

Anti-racism at home and Zionism-as-imperialism abroad is a nifty way to redirect focus from this reality. And just as Tom Barson, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia uprising, has written, the roots of the tumult are not so much social anomie as it is “deflection”. Otherwise, the student elites might observe their professional middle class has gobbled up 83% of the America’s wealth since 1989. Or that the income gap between college and non-college was a mere 10% in the Seventies (today it is 70%). They could notice that the just over 500, mostly urban, coastal counties where they reside is home to 70% of all wealth, and that an epidemic of “deaths of despair” tears through the thousands of counties left behind. They might even notice that today it is college that separates the underclass from everyone else — and that it should be the cause of social protest, not its incubator.

The Columbia protesters are too coiled up in political introversion to notice these historical ironies. And that is why they will only end up repeating the greatest Sixties irony of them all. After all the fury of that decade, its greatest political achievement was to pave Richard Nixon’s route to the presidency, shattering the coalition that had carried LBJ to a landslide in 1964. By broadcasting the worst of the modern Left to America and its “silent majority”, these students can do the same, sabotaging the current government and boosting a crook to the White House.


Jeff Bloodworth is a writer and professor of American political history at Gannon University

jhueybloodworth

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Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
6 months ago

Oh please. Gag me with a spoon. The Sixties New Left was just as ruling-class adjacent as today’s keffiyeh fashioned left. And did not Herbert Marcuse develop his “repressive tolerance” that mainstreamed lefty intolerance back in the 1960s?

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
6 months ago

Is that a BDSM request ?

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
6 months ago

I have never bought into the idea that the people of South Vietnam being subjected to a brutal communist dictatorship was a good thing.

A D Kent
A D Kent
6 months ago

Oh come on Professor – you can’t expect anyone to take you seriously after this:

“This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden.”

So then Professor, what do you think would happen were the US to cut off the supplies of munitions and spares it continues to send to Israel. What ieven if they just asked them to actually pay for what they sent? What about the UN Vetoes and other diplomatic support they’ve offered? Did these options available to Biden to put even just a little pressure on Netanyahu not to ignore him not occur to you at all? Seems rather, you know, intellectually sloppy to me.

Likewise, if this isn’t the US’s war then what were their carriers doing in the Gulf and Red Sea recently? What were all those planes doing in the air when the Iranians sent up those drones?

Oh and re the historical analogies – don’t you think that the threat of the draft hanging over the earlier generation might have been a factor worth including in your comparison of the demonstrators then and now? I think it puts the actions of those of today in a less self-interested and therefore morally superior light.  

Tony Plaskow
Tony Plaskow
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Any chance to bash Israel eh Kenty! (that’s a deliberate misspell BTW).

You would rather the US supported the barbaric anti America terrorists I assume? Those darn Jews, always being so effective in repelling the genocidal terrorists, damn them for being supported by their closest allies.

You should go and be in Gaza them you can literally fire missiles from within the civilian population Hamas uses as their human shield. You know, the population they’re meant to be protecting…

A D Kent
A D Kent
6 months ago
Reply to  Tony Plaskow

With all due respect, that’s doltish, even for here. Of course I wouldn’t want the US to support this lot of ‘barbarian terrorists’ – I didn’t when they did it in Afghanistan, I didn’t in Iraq, I didn’t in Syria, Kosovo or Libya and I won’t start now.

Do you agree with the Professor that the US have no influence over Israel? No levels they can pull? (Note – it looks like they’ve tried to pull a few today re a Rafah attack).

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Well, the carriers were in the gulf and Red Sea in an effort to protect the sea lanes from interdiction by one of Iran’s proxies, which I’d guess mostly benefits Egypt and Europe. Damn us Americans.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

It’s a fact that the military draft of the 1960s was a major factor, perhaps the most important factor, in the protest movement at that time. However amateurish the protests of today might seem to the writer of this piece, and no matter whether it will only serve to get Trump elected, the point is real. Israel is acting in defiance of the law and engaging in the worst sort of ethnic cleansing. Somebody needs to let our execrable US ruling class know that they’re largely responsible for it.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
6 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

October 7 was memory-holed rather quickly, it seems. And no one wants to discuss how, even now, Hamas leaders are insistent about their goal of a Middle East without Israel. Naturally, the problem is the Jews who refuse to die.

A D Kent
A D Kent
6 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

I think you’ve got a rather strange understanding of memory hole. Oct 7th is front and centre of everything.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
6 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

And precisely what “law” is Israel defying and what ethnic cleansing is ongoing? The Pali population has exploded over the past decades, suggesting a pretty poor job of “ethnic cleansing” by the Israelis. Open your deluded eyes and study some real history (i.e. not Islamic history rewrites). The Palestinians really should go back to where they all came from, Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as there really is nor ever has been a “Palestinian” nation. Unfortunately, none of the aforementioned nations want them back, as most forcefully kicked them out because they were troublemakers.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

what do you think would happen were the US to cut off the supplies of munitions and spares it continues to send to Israel.
I will entertain that question with one condition – the US also cuts off the money sent to the UNRWA that somehow manages to filter down to Hamas. As an American taxpayer, I don’t want to fund this any more than I want to fund the killing in Ukraine or the fear-mongering in Taiwan. One of us is standing in a principle; the other is making arguments based on the principals involved.

A D Kent
A D Kent
6 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

If the US stopped the weapons the UNRWA funds soon wouldn’t be necessary as the Israelis would have to come to some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians that didn’t involve trying to starve them.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Yes, it’s deplorable that so many have to die. But how do you reason with people who believe they will go to heaven once they exterminate you and everyone you love? It’s easy for us to judge from the comfort of our armchairs and computer screens.

A D Kent
A D Kent
6 months ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

Of course that’s a hard question, but I absolutely, categorically would not have gone about it by blasting everyone and everything in the area where they may or may not have been. Even if I didn’t care about them as human beings I might have given some thought to how the bereaved and orphaned might wish to act in the future before I embarked on a bloodbath of revenge.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
6 months ago
Reply to  A D Kent

Well, good old befuddled uncle Joe just said the US would cut off aid if Israel invaded Rafah, and Israel just responded they will invade anyway.

Chris Whybrow
Chris Whybrow
6 months ago

I only posted this comment so the app would remember I’m signed in and have a membership and therefore stop prompting me to pay again for a subscription I already have. It didn’t work.

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
6 months ago
Reply to  Chris Whybrow

It wouldn’t let me post comments for about 6 months.

Paul T
Paul T
6 months ago

Durchfall.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
6 months ago

Well he’s right about one thing; this is a mere performative re-iteration of the 60’s revolutionary loop. They’ve even got the cosplay military fatigues, dark glasses and Che Guevara posters.

But ‘les soixante-huitards’ were a mostly middle-class imitation of their illustrious forbears. Daniel Cohn-Bendit ended up as an MEP for God’s sake.

This SJW panto will eventually deflate like a balloon and the little dears can go back to finish their gender studies courses and look forward to a job at Poundstretcher with 60K in debt.

Then they’ll have something to get angry about.

J Bryant
J Bryant
6 months ago
Reply to  Mike Downing

the little dears can go back to finish their gender studies courses and look forward to a job at Poundstretcher with 60K in debt.
Sadly, I suspect the little dears can look forward to a 60K/year job in HR or the civil service.

Chipoko
Chipoko
6 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

One ‘Little Dear’ I know (friend’s daughter) attended a posh private school, then top UK university after which she moved to London where she works for Meta (AKA FaceBook) – huge salary well in excess of #100,000 p.a. (no staff responsibilities) with three free meals a day and gym facilities thrown into the deal. She donates to Black Lives Matter and supports the Palestinian cause. Gen Z!

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
6 months ago
Reply to  Chipoko

Disgusting.

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
6 months ago
Reply to  Mike Downing

“SJW panto” – that is awesome. They call themselves activists but they are really just brown nosed apple polishers. They are pathetic.

Simon James
Simon James
6 months ago

1968 = Genesis
2024 = Marillion

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
6 months ago

The historical rhymes extend well beyond such surface symbolism. Outraged by racism and injustice at home, protesters have coalesced around a foreign war.
We’re actually comparing the civil rights era with today? Please stop insulting people’s intelligence. When I started school, it was with classmates whose parents lived “colored only” times. No student today can make anything resembling that claim and to say otherwise insults the memory of people who put up with far more than today’s entitled class could ever imagine.

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
6 months ago

“It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968.” 
Very, very superficially:
Protests of the ElitesThey doth project too much.
In Rock ‘N’ Roll (2006), Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard contrasts Les Soixant-Huitards (the 1968’ers) of Cambridge University with the liberal reformers of the Prague Spring of 1968. The liberal program of the spring of 1968 gave way, of course, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968…
Back on the Cambridge University campus, students protest the war in Vietnam. Not that that might not have been worth protesting, but Tom Stoppard gently suggests that the protests amounted more to fashionable posing and posturing than to actual protesting. There might have been some violence. All in good fun!
But, one could imagine that on places like the campus of Columbia University in 1968, protests had more substance. Students had already for some years made a point of burning their “draft cards.” They faced the prospect of military conscription. “Vietnam” was not some abstract thing to many of them…

Mark epperson
Mark epperson
6 months ago

Sorta, the 1960’s was a seachange but it was not due to “students, whatever that means. 1968 was the critical year, with the Tet Offensive, MLK and JFK assassinations, the Chicago Democratic Party convention, and the Watts riots. “Main Street” America was the impetus for the change, not the student movement, as they had enough. I was a “student” in the 60’s and there was a different vibe, most people knew what was happening and wanted a change. And it happened. These current “protestors” should have arrived in clown cars. As the author states, they are wannabes, but ignorant of the issues, and no real change will occur because they have no sense of morality, just an agenda. Vacuous and vapid.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
6 months ago

Good essay, but is the US really a ‘militarised police state’ or are police generally just trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities in a gun culture?

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
6 months ago

Fascinating article. I’ve always been of the opinion that our modern wokesters were the intellectual heirs to the failed philosophies of those campus protesters of the 60’s. The author appears to be one of these older progressives sitting in judgement over the inadequacy of the younger generation, like a demanding father wagging his finger and shaking his head, disgusted by his spoiled and underachieving son. That he’s seeing his own generation through rose tinted glasses or that he sounds like an old man complaining about young people and their weird hair and bad music never crosses his his mind. That his own generation wasn’t all that successful at propagating their ideas broadly, and that it was Nixon, the antithesis of the anti-war movement, who finally withdrew troops from Vietnam, is also conveniently left unmentioned.
Who is at fault for the student who disappoints his teacher? Is the defect in the teaching or in the learning, or perhaps both? If the hippie generation is dissatisfied with the wokesters, they’ve nobody to blame but themselves and their charges. Logically, one or both of the two must be found wanting. It makes no sense to blame anybody else. The wokesters certainly didn’t learn to see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, oppressor and oppressed from me or from any other libertarian, conservative, moderate, or populist. It’s a pretty silly situation. As incomprehensible as this must be to the author, most people don’t feel any pressing need to be a fighter in some great crusade for truth and justice, though they’ll join the party if concessions are being served or just to go along with a crowd.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
6 months ago

“Today’s students are little more than a patchy historical shadow”
They’re outright fkn Nazis, on which subject this article is utterly and shamefully silent.