The protesters were massed outside the gates of Columbia University, separated by a metal barrier and a few police. On one side, a young woman waved a large Palestinian flag, taunting her foes with chants for “intifada revolution”. On the other side, a man draped in an Israeli flag blew on a piercing whistle and barked back at her and her comrades: “Fuck you, Jew-haters . . . Suck it!”
Within hours, New York City police clad in riot gear and toting stun grenades would breach Columbia’s Hamilton Hall to clear protesters in a scene reminiscent of 1968, when the same building was seized by students opposing the Vietnam war.
In the particulars, differences abound. Yet the year 1968 — when an unpopular foreign war ignited American campuses, creating a sense of disorder that upended the Democratic National Convention and doomed Lyndon B Johnson, the then president — has become a touchstone for today’s unrest, and what it might augur both for society and the November election.
“That kind of disorder that was taking place in the streets — the violence between police and protesters — without that, Richard Nixon would have never won,” said Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who recalled tuning into the chaotic 1968 Democratic national convention each night from Mississippi, where he was then serving as a young civil rights lawyer.
Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist who was 18 and working at a deli counter in New York in 1968, said a sense that things were spinning out of control would punish today’s incumbent too. “Young people are not likely to vote,” he predicted, “but they are likely to cause a major rift in the country”.
While their demands vary by the university, protesters by and large are calling for their schools to divest from companies with business in Israel and to cut ties with Israeli universities.
Most have been peaceful, although their character can change throughout the day and depending on the involvement of other actors. Many Jews have taken part, appalled by a death toll in Gaza that according to Palestinian authorities has exceeded 34,000 people in a matter of months and with the help of US weapons.
The protests have generated searing images well beyond Columbia: mounted police confronting students at the University of Texas in Austin; rival groups brawling at the University of California, Los Angeles; an economics professor crying in horror as a police officer tackled her to the ground at Emory University in Atlanta.
They are contributing to an already tumultuous season in America. The former — and possibly future — president, Donald Trump, has been standing criminal trial in a courthouse in Lower Manhattan. There is no telling how his supporters, or diehard opponents, will react to a verdict. Earlier in the trial, a man self-immolated outside the courthouse.
Meanwhile, waves of migration have for months been stirring tension in big cities, including New York and Chicago, that have yet to fully recover from the worst pandemic in more than a century. On a daily basis, the nation is skirmishing over abortion, the insurrection at the Capitol three years ago, and the war in Ukraine. The coming election, already rife with Republican claims of fraud, seems to be stirring more dread than hope.
Mitchell Moss, a professor at New York University — also a focus of unrest — called it “lazy thinking” to equate 1968 too closely with the present. He and his contemporaries were protesting against US involvement in an unpopular war in which they were at risk of being sent to fight and die. By contrast, his students “are not being called to sacrifice personally”.
Still, the similarities are eerie: both began at Columbia and then mushroomed across the nation. As, J Edgar Hoover, the long-time FBI director, warned in an August 1968 bulletin: “Encouraged by their ‘success’ at Columbia, the anarchists in the New Left movement are only spreading the word that they intend to create ‘two, three, many Columbias’ in the manner of one of their ‘heroes’, Che Guevara.”
Both featured ageing Democratic presidents — Johnson then, and Biden today — struggling to hold together coalitions fissuring under the weight of generational and cultural change. In August 1968, that weight became unbearable when Democrats gathered in Chicago for what became a televised spectacle of a nation at war with itself. Hundreds of police and protesters were injured in the mayhem.
This August, the Democrats will again hold their convention in Chicago (it almost seems beside the point that Robert F Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1968 and now his son, RFK, Jr, is doing so today).
“Good luck with the convention in Chicago!” Jeremy Varon, a professor at The New School, who has written extensively on the period, quipped. “The comparisons are so stark.”
As with Vietnam, Varon viewed the war in Gaza as a moral cause that has mobilised students but also become a catalyst for broader discontent with the world they are inheriting. The war, he said, “is tearing this society apart and making university life miserable”.
Biden, who was a young Delaware lawyer in 1968, still fleshing out his politics, appears keenly aware of the parallels. In recent addresses, he has tried to hold on to the middle ground, defending the right to protest while distancing himself from the demonstrators.
“I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world,” he said during a Holocaust remembrance ceremony on Capitol Hill this week. “But there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech, or threats of violence,” he said. “No one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.”
On Wednesday, the president took the extraordinary step of suspending shipments of large munitions to Israel to prevent it from attacking Rafah, the heavily populated city in southern Gaza that is believed to be the last holdout for Hamas, the terror group that attacked Israel on October 7.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centres,” he told CNN in an unusually public condemnation of Israel.
Until now, Biden has been guided by his record as an ardent supporter of Israel, as well as polls, which show that while Democrats — especially young ones — have increasingly embraced the Palestinian cause, the protests are not gaining wider backing among the electorate.
Democrats point to the president’s success in 2020 at fending off attacks from Republicans who sought to associate him with the left-wing “defund the police” movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. He did so by disavowing riots or looting while sympathising with the push for greater racial justice.
Meanwhile, they are hoping that the 2024 convention will be calm. In the 1990s, such party gatherings were designated a “National Special Security Event” due to the risk of terror attack. Hence, federal and local authorities should be better equipped to deal with protests than their baton-swinging counterparts were a half-century ago.
“When the country looks to Chicago this August, the unity and excitement of Democrats will stand in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP,” Matt Hill, a DNC spokesperson, predicted.
But even if they manage to control the convention, itself, the Biden administration is likely to face further signs of upheaval as long as the war continues. Varon predicted that protests would only intensify, as they did after 1968. “Thousands of people are now bonded by the common experience of being arrested,” he said. “This is like a crucible.”
A movement fired by moral indignation and facilitated by social media will rage through the Chicago convention in August and beyond, a keffiyeh-wearing Columbia graduate student promised. “People are fighting for an end to genocide,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s something that’s regulated by the beginning or end of the semester.”
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