Are armbands coming?
Two things, both from The Atlantic.
If you are one of those people who cannot look at Stephen Miller without seeing him in a black uniform with a red armband, consider, he’ll have company if things ever come to that.
Adam Serwer on Wednesday pointedly called out wannabe goose-steppers in the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, of course.
“Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint,” Serwer begins:
On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.
But you know what he meant, just as the MAGA mob on Jan. 6 knew what Donald Trump meant by “fight like hell.”
The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.
See “But you know what he meant” above. When Trump began his presidency with his “American carnage” speech, he wasn’t describing reality but revealing his innermost desires.
Today at The Atlantic, George Packer laments what I’ve noticed for decades: a lack of learning curve on the protesty left. Commenting on those same student protesters, Packer writes:
In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?
I’ve wondered that since the 1970s. I wrote in a September 2005 column for the local paper:
Friends I describe as all-natural, vegetarian chain smokers have attended protest rallies since college. It’s a kind of hobby. They are probably in Washington right now, marching against the war in Iraq. Sometimes they would invite me along to protest [your favorite liberal cause here], promising it would be fun.
Sure. I can think of lots of things more fun than protesting foreign wars and abuses of power. Or listening to impassioned speeches with rhetoric so threadbare that you can close your eyes and imagine yourself at any street rally since 1966.
This weekend major U.S. cities will see protests against the conflict in Iraq. The usual cast of characters will be massing in Washington: squads of pall bearers with mock coffins, Grim Reapers, pets in drag, and clowns for peace.
Friends, would you please consider doing something effective for a change? If you like playing dress-up, there’s the Society for Creative Anachronism. For fun, rent a Jackie Chan film. We’ve watched you get arrested earning your merit badges in civil disobedience long enough to figure out that what’s really arrested is your political development.
It’s not that your issues aren’t worthwhile. Most are. And sure, protesting can be cathartic and promote a sense of solidarity with your tribe. You go home feeling better about the issues. But wouldn’t you rather go home having done something with half a chance of resolving them? If you want to effect change, you have to influence political leaders and win the hearts and minds of American voters.
Face it, America is not swayed by mass die-ins dramatizing the loss of life caused by war. Or by coeds dressed as “corporate whores” to satirize conglomerates prostituting after Defense Department dollars. Or by indoctrinating children through activist puppet dramas with all the subtlety of temperance plays.
How do I know? Because you’ve been staging these sideshows for decades and the red states keep getting redder. These are time-tested wastes of your energies and talents, public curiosities, local color on the news at six. I’d rather go bowling.
Packer chalks up the calcified format of these protests to the evolution of the post-liberal university since the 1960s.
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