tzimmer_history

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

I wrote about how the legacy of 1968 is invoked to delegitimize the student protests.

And I explore a different history of the 1960s: A story not of destructive radicalism, but of a generation that rightfully objected to a vast gulf between aspiration and reality in America. 2/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

Has there ever been a (leftwing) student protest movement that wasn’t immediately derided by the political center and elite opinion as too radical, deluded, misguided, counter-productive, and dangerous? And yet, almost all were indisputably proven right by history. 3/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

Pundits look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. With rightwing protests (Tea Party! Trucker convoy!), meanwhile, we are always asked to do the opposite: Look for the least incriminating interpretation, one that does not foreground extremism. 4/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

Centrist opinionists describe the protesters as either extremist ideologues - or cosplaying adolescents who are in it purely for the “thrill.” Which is it? No answer.

The key message is: Do not lend any legitimacy to their motivations, their diagnosis, or their demands. 5/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

This exact 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. 6/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

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. 7/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

But 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. 8/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

In recent U.S. history, student protest movements have consistently functioned as a necessary corrective: A thorn in the side of elites who were too blind, too complacent, or too complicit to see that America was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations, at home and abroad. 9/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

It is precisely the fact that the students are not yet conditioned to filter everything through the lens of partisan realpolitik, that they refuse to let electoralism be the alpha and omega of their politics, that enables them to serve as a sensor and a corrective. 10/

tzimmer_history, 21 days ago

The university has provided an environment that allowed young people to formulate an unsparing critique of America’s shortcomings and the injustices it ignored or actively perpetuated. The core message has always been: We demand you do better! 11/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

Kahn describes the Summer of 2020 as “a crazy period” that “frayed nerves everywhere” - he denounces the “excesses of the period,” meaning the spread of “woke” ideas and too much anti-Trumpism inside and outside the NYT. “A period of peak cultural angst,” he calls it. 2/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

This is precisely the spirit that is also fueling the elite centrist support for the crackdown on college protesters - an acute anxiety that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals who were given too much rope during the Trump era urgently need to be reined in. 3/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

The mass protests in the summer of 2020 loom almost as large in the elite centrist mind as they do in the imagination of the Reactionary and Far-Right, where it’s become dogma to regard the protests as the moment the “extreme Left” escalated its assault on “real” America. 4/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

The polite mainstream and center elites, meanwhile, felt compelled - momentarily - to lend their support to these protests in 2020. But to status quo fundamentalists, uprisings of any kind are ultimately dangerous, illegitimate, and must not be tolerated. 5/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

The prevailing view on the center is that we need to turn the clock back, to a time before what they see as the current excesses of radical leftism, “wokeism,” identity politics, “cancel culture”… Too much “chaos,” too much “unrest” and “turmoil.” Who can stem the tide? 6/

tzimmer_history, 25 days ago

Centrist elites seem convinced that those young radicals must be prevented from toppling an order of, as they see it, reason, stability, and quite enough progress (no more!) by any means necessary.

Even if that entails legitimizing and making common cause with the Far-Right. /end

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

Packer claims the postwar “liberal” university was devoted to the “disinterested pursuit of truth” before it was “trashed” by leftwing radicals who turned it into an indoctrination chamber brainwashing kids into a bunch of restless extremists. What brutally ahistorical nonsense! 2/

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

The story George Packer presents in The Atlantic is very much in line with what Christopher Rufo has been propagating. A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse!) to the protests of 2020 – in Packer’s telling: to Columbia 2024.

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

Rufo and Packer both present Dutschke’s “march through the institutions” as if it was the smoking gun that proved a vast conspiracy – as if the fact that a West-German student leader in the 60s made a grand proclamation was sufficient evidence of a leftist takeover of America.

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

Packer’s argument that there is a direct line of leftwing indoctrination from 1968 to today doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny - but it provides a window into the elite anxieties that are driving so much of mainstream politics in America.

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

This crackdown on college protests and the support it is receiving from mainstream elites is about Israel and Gaza – but not just about Israel and Gaza. It is also fueled by a pervasive sense that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals urgently need to be reined in.

tzimmer_history, 26 days ago

Packer preemptively blames the students for a Trump win in November, warning that the Right will exploit these “excesses of the left.”

Has it occurred to him that he is helping them succeed by laundering and legitimizing every Rufo conspiracy for a mainstream audience?

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https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/americas-elites-fear-the-ghost-of