No, 2024 isn’t 1968.
The comparisons are coming in hot and heavy, partly because there’s again an occupation on the Columbia campus but mostly because the internet has scrambled the relationship between past and present as anyone can cull enough facts online to play an Instant Expert.
And because social media favors a discourse dominated by people expressing indignation and outrage about events that don’t directly concern them in a perverse form of fandom.
In 1968, the presidential race was upended when Democratic candidate Bobby Kennedy became the fourth national figure assassinated in a five-year span also marked by a badly overdue civil rights triumph that reshaped the nation’s politics along with urban riots, rising crime rates and white flight.
In 1968, there was a lousy, bloody undeclared war that American soldiers were dying and killing in, and a draft that meant students had skin in that game. In loco parentis, the judicial concept that gave colleges the legal authority of mom and dad, still applied and administrators wielded it to try and stifle protests.
The campus fights in 2024 are nominally about a war being waged by Israel, with no American troops fighting in it — though five U.S. citizens kidnapped by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack that provoked that war are still being held hostage, as are Israeli men, women and children.
In practice, the campus occupations are an extension of a long-running campaign by radical faculty members and students to pressure university leaders to divest from companies that have anything to do with Israel.
That’s awfully different, and a lot less romantic or popular.
Which is why those activists are framing Israel’s response to a brutal surprise attack as a supposedly genocidal campaign by an allegedly apartheid state to eliminate Palestinians.
That loaded language doesn’t describe events but categorizes them in a way that suggests anyone who sees things otherwise is morally sick. It’s a messaging campaign aimed at younger Americans, and the Democratic Party that counts on their support, using the brutality of urban warfare to advance a decades-long activist campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel.
Never mind that Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip without the consent of its people for nearly two decades, is one of the proxy forces across the Middle East largely funded and controlled by Iran, a near-nuclear state openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of Jews.
The religious and ideological zealots who violently dominate what was once Persia back army-sized militias in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. They execute protesters at home, and openly export terror and aim to murder dissidents abroad — including right here in Brooklyn.
All that’s apparently beside the point to the people, on campus and off, who are following a well-rehearsed script in their efforts to get elite institutions to yield or over-react in ways that shift public sympathy. Many of the protesters are masked, in part out of fear of being named and menaced online, and a fair share are themselves menacing online and in person. There are people who openly support Hamas, and even Iran.
There are many people including ones I love, work with and respect who are simply appalled by the images of death and destruction they see inside of Gaza, the choices Israel made that preceded this latest war and the role American-provided military equipment is playing in it.
But constantly distinguishing better behaved protesters from angrier and more aggressive ones is a lot like constantly distinguishing Hamas or Hezbollah from Iran.
Spoiler alert: The protesters encamping at colleges, blocking bridges and otherwise vowing to “shut it all down” aren’t going to take control of the universities or the Democratic Party let alone the national security apparatus.
There is one significant way that 2024 looks like 1968. Protesters are creating the scenes of chaos that a half century ago helped elect a presidential candidate the American people had previously rejected as he pledged to end the chaotic scenes captivating the nation.
“As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night,” Richard Nixon said in accepting the Republican nomination in Miami, weeks after the Siege of Chicago.
He painted a picture a lot like the ones Fox News viewers are bombarded with today, that city dwellers know isn’t the whole story but is a sustained spotlight on part of it.
There is “another voice,” Nixon continued, “the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans — the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.”
Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
