This was published 4 months ago
Opinion
Why Donald Trump will benefit from the US college chaos
Nick Bryant
Journalist and authorJust when it seemed that the 1860s, the decade of the American Civil War, provided the historical touchstone for contemporary America, along comes a torrent of student protests that recall the 1960s, the last time the United States was so flagrantly disunited. Back in April 1968, Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York was occupied by students protesting over the war in Vietnam and black civil rights, a takeover broken up by officers from the NYPD. Fifty-six years on, almost to the day, officers cleared the very same building of students angry over the war in Gaza.
Much like the ’60s, the protests are part of a nationwide movement. By strange historical coincidence, the Democrats are holding their convention this year in Chicago, where the party gathered in 1968 amid running street battles between anti-war protesters and police. The news cycle doubles also as a historical cycle, which brings to mind the words of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill: “There is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now.”
NYPD officers from the Strategic Response Group form a wall of protection against the pro-Palestinian protest encampment at Columbia University. Credit: AP/Stefan Jeremiah
Widely it was thought that the most electorally significant event to take place in New York at this critical juncture of an election year would be the first criminal trial of Donald Trump, which is unfolding in a courthouse in Lower Manhattan. But the disturbances at this Ivy League institution have thrown up a west side story which also has the potential to affect the outcome of the race.
A lesson from 1968 – and, indeed, from the 1972 election – is that campus unrest favours the Republicans. Richard Nixon won in 1968 and achieved a landslide victory four years later. His promise in the late-1960s to restore law and order helped him pull off an improbable comeback, after his defeat by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election and the humiliation of losing his bid for the governorship of California two years later, a setback thought to have been politically terminal.
Nixon was not the only beneficiary. George Wallace, the race-baiting former governor of Alabama who ran as in independent in 1968, was like a hog in mud. A populist outsider and nationalistic forerunner of Donald Trump, Wallace mocked both the protesters and the cultural elitism of the institutions where they studied. “They must be teaching anarchy in the universities today,” was his response to student hecklers.
Ridiculing protesters also helped fuel the rise of the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan. “They chant like Tarzan, look like Jane and smell like Cheetah,” was a go-to line for Reagan when confronted by “hippie” protesters on California campuses, another battleground of the 2024 protests.
Cultural combat is catnip to the conservative outrage complex. In 1968, Roger Ailes, the future head of Fox News who worked then as a Republican consultant, packed Nixon’s town hall meetings with anti-war activists, knowing they would bombard his candidate with hostile questions. Not only did these confrontations make for riveting television, they framed the election as a choice between law and order and counter-cultural chaos. It has been a winning formula for conservatives ever since.
The Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson deployed this dog-eared operating manual when he appeared on campus at Columbia and called for the deployment of the National Guard. Here was a Deep South white evangelical venturing into the enemy territory of a Big Apple liberal bastion. Even Roger Ailes would have marvelled at the choreography of such a polarising political stunt.
Klaxons should be sounding at the White House. Even before the protests, Joe Biden’s lead among young voters, traditionally such a reliable Democratic demographic, had shrivelled. Strangely, though, Politico reported this week on the Biden campaign’s “relative nonchalance”, based on the belief that the Gaza war is not uppermost in the minds of young voters. Abortion, they think, will be an overriding issue. Cancelling the student debt for hundreds of thousands of borrowers and reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug are also seen as Gen Z vote-winners.
The president has also ramped up his criticism of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For all that, the Biden campaign seems still to be in denial about how the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel is of more pressing concern to many voters than the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Biden coalition, which won him the 2020 election, is splintering. Trump has already been making inroads with African-American and Latino voters. Campus unrest might also push wavering Republicans back into the arms of the indicted former president. Even a small subset of voters could decide what promises to be a photo-finish election, which is why the Democrats should be worried that so many students are showing more solidarity with Palestinians than they are with an 81-year-old president.
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.