Weekend reading: I wrote about how mainstream commentators constantly raise the specter of 1968 to denounce the student protests - willfully ignoring the long pattern of leftwing student movements acting as an indispensable corrective.
Commentators look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. They often do this while conceding that the vast majority of students are genuine in their concern for the lives of innocent civilians. Why not foreground this reality about the protests? 2/
This is certainly not how mainstream opinion has approached rightwing protests: When it comes to the Tea Party, Trump rallies, or Trucker convoys, we are asked to look for the least incriminating, most empathetic interpretation, one that does not foreground extremism. 3/
The accusations against the students are also disingenuously inconsistent: They are derided as both extremist ideologues (who never fight back when the armed agents of the state arrest them?) and cosplaying children (why send police in riot gear then?). 4/
The approach that dominates the mainstream discourse has been invariably used to delegitimize every major (left-coded) protest movement in history, very much including the ones that polite society today likes to affirm and claim as examples of the good protest. 5/
The 1960s loom large in the collective imaginary of mainstream America. 1968, in particular, is constantly invoked to lend more credence to the idea that we are currently looking at a destructive uprising, as young people are – yet again! – giving in to irrational impulses. 6/
What has entered our collective memory as “1968” was the culmination of student-led protests that erupted in around 60 countries at the same time. This was a truly transnational phenomenon, and those who protested perceived of themselves as part of a global movement. 7/
The campus was the epicenter of the “unrest” that was animated by a longing to overcome the status quo, as the students were convinced the elites in power were betraying the ideals and promises they constantly invoked to perpetuate and legitimize the existing system. 8/
The 1960s protesters were not rejecting the ideals America had always proclaimed – they were demanding the country finally live up to them. It was the anger over the gap between grand democratic promises and discriminatory realities that animated them. 9/
The vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t become terrorists or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures - their energy fueled the social movements of the 70s. 10/
Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have had a lot to do with that. To reduce their legacy to “Nixon won” is simplistic and disingenuously reductive. 11/
Students were at the forefront of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, South African apartheid in the 1980s, the Iraq War in the early 2000s. All of these protest movements were, at the time, widely derided as manifestations of leftwing radicalism. 12/
It does not follow from this pattern that all left-coded student protesters are inevitably correct in their diagnosis and always justified in all the actions they take – or that all their specific demands are necessarily helpful and constructive. 13/
But we must grapple with the role left-coded student protest movements have consistently played in recent U.S. history: As a corrective, reminding the nation that it was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations.
@tzimmer_history This was exactly my take on youth movements at that time: we were demanding that society live up to its ideals, not pretend that lip service was sufficient.
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