I recently reviewed a book about the May 1970 Ohio National Guard killings of four Kent State University students during protests against the Vietnam War. The demonstrations were prompted by President Richard Nixon’s decision to expand the war into Cambodia. In addition to the four students who died, nine others were wounded, including one who was paralyzed from the waist down. Two of the students killed were mere onlookers, uninvolved in the unruly protest. No guardsman was held accountable for the killings, nor were any of the commanding officers, who clearly failed to control their troops or deploy them in a responsible manner.
The killings set off the largest student protest movement in American history, shutting down campuses across the country, including my own small liberal-arts college. A few months earlier, in November 1969, I and half a million other people had gone to Washington D.C. to participate in the largest antiwar demonstration in U.S. history. I marched with a college friend and his father, who, like my own father, was a World War II veteran of the Army Air Force. In the wake of the Kent State shootings, I also participated in the “student strike,” which issued what were predictably maximalist demands. Students—and many faculty—wanted an end to “the systematic repression of political dissidents and release of all political prisoners,” the withdrawal of forces from Southeast Asia, and the end of university complicity with the “U.S. war Machine.”
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.
Perhaps it would be more useful to think about why mass protest movements fail. Writing shortly after the tumultuous political protests of the late 1960s, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that the impersonal and rootless social experience of modern student life found expression in the symbolic language of mass protests. Largely cut off from the larger world, students existed in a world “dominated by principles. It is as if things, not people, determine their lot. And, as with principles and things, there is no arguing with these people in charge, no appeal to compassion…. So they use marches and mass protests as expressions of revolt,” she wrote. But “the drive to achieve consonance between social and physical and emotional experience envelopes the mind also in its sweep. Hence the failure of revolutionary millennialists to write a programme that in any way matches the strength of their case. Hence the apparent flippancy or unserious abandon with which they pronounce their diagnosis and their remedies.”
The uncompromising idealism of student protesters is rooted in social and economic isolation and detachment. As a result, the protester is “optimistic about human nature (once freed from the external machine) and about the outcome of his policies. He fuses disparate problems together and resists attempts to define and distinguish. For his single problem, overthrow of the evil system, he advocates a simple solution, usually symbolic and expected to have magical effect,” Douglas writes.
I think that is an accurate description of the demands made during the student strike in 1970, which proved so counterproductive to any resolution of the war in Vietnam. Douglas’s analysis also helps explain the failure of contemporary student demands that the United States end military aid to Israel and that universities divest from companies doing business with the country. By killing so many civilians in Gaza, Israel has arguably committed war crimes. But Israel’s security situation—it is surrounded by governments and Islamist groups dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state—does not lend itself to any simple diplomatic solution (or to an optimistic view of human nature). In criticizing Israel, everything depends on defining and distinguishing—not fusing—the threats posed and the potential remedies for them.
In her essay, Tufekci acknowledges that protest movements need “message discipline” and “organizational structure” if they hope to be effective. What she does not acknowledge is that the social and psychological dynamics of mass protests make building such structures very difficult, if not impossible. “The solution to the problems which provoke [mass demonstrations] is not to join the stampede,” Douglas wrote. “To throw overboard differentiating doctrines and differentiating rituals is to reach for the poison that symbolizes the ill. [Those] around us who feel this excitement in the air, rather than yield, should feel more practical compassion for the rootlessness and helplessness that inspire it.”
This is why it is usually not hard for governments or college administrations to eventually outmaneuver a student protest movement. Insofar as they are mere expressions of “rootlessness and helplessness,” tied to vague or impossible demands, they are unlikely to muster either the discipline or the focus necessary to effect real political change.
