Over the last week, students protesting racism at Yale and Mizzou (and other campuses) became national news. The backlash has been vociferous, both from the right and from many liberals. To take extreme examples, the Federalist declared that the protests show “that it’s time to burn the universities to the ground,” and RedStatecalled the Mizzou football strikers “Cowardly Liberal Lazy Douchebags.” At its core, the “PC culture” backlash is driven by fear of young people, particularly young women and young people of color, challenging unjust institutions. But the hand-wringing also illustrates a key divide between the left and right: how they treat activists.
One leading liberal writer declared that the campus protests represent something deeper, and more sinister, than anti-racism activism: “American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.” The event that led to the protestors being unfavorably compared to past Marxist governments. The event may be distasteful, but it takes quite an imagination to conjure up a scenario in which it is evidence of creeping Stalinism.
However, there are indeed movements in the United States that consider violence or threat of it a legitimate means to political change, that frequently harass reporters, that silence academics and researchers. The problem is you find them on the right. There are the conservative activists who brandish fully-automatic weapons in public spaces. There are the pro-life activists who harass, both verbally and physically, women obtaining abortions — on a wide scale and in an organized manner. One in five abortion clinics reported “severe violence” in the past year (blockades, clinic invasions, bombing, arson, chemical attacks, stalking, physical violence, gunfire, bomb threats, arson threats, and death threats), and other forms of harassment have increased dramatically in the past four years (see chart).
The gun rights movement has muzzled research about gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control. Recently a conservative billionaire sued Mother Jones in an effort to tie up funds and destroy the magazine. The Koch brothers have succeeded in funding hundreds of university departments and have attempted to use their clout todetermine curriculum. Republican governors have used their political power to cut funding to university centers that they find ideologically inconvenient. Though the real police have killed nearly 1,000 people this year, many elite columnists are more concerned about the “PC police” who have merely called for more inclusive universities.
When David Simon called the Mizzou protesters “fascists,” Tressie McMillan Cottomnoted correctly:
“What we saw at that student rally was democracy in action, not fascism. Fascism means something more than a thing one does not like. Fascism means a system of social organization that concentrates power and doesn’t just discourage dissent but organizes the State against it.”
There are many things in the world today, and even in America, that resemble actual fascism or creeping fascism. Student activism is not one of those things.
The liberal reaction to many recent events points to an asymmetry in how party elites treat their activist bases. Consider the Keystone XL protestors, who recently won a key victory in the fight against climate change. Though Jonathan Chait considers climate change “the most dire threat to humanity,” he condemned the Keystone XL fight as a “huge mistake” (and even compared the protestors to Republicans trying to shut down the government). Similarly, though liberals are deeply concerned about rising inequality and stagnant wages, the Fight For $15 was widely denounced by elite liberals as either a “hopeless waste of time” or “worrisome.” This disdain of activism also applies to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been vociferously criticized for shaking up various Democratic presidential campaigns this year.