As a participant in anti-Vietnam War protests, I felt some clear comparisons to today’s antiwar protests was in order, so I wrote an assessment at New York:
For many a baby-boomer, the sights and sounds of student protests against U.S. complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza brought back vivid memories of the anti–Vietnam War movement of their youth and of the conservative backlash that ultimately placed its legacy in question. Some of today’s protestors consciously promote an identification with their forebears of the 1960s and 1970s. And some events — notably the huge deployments of NYPD officers at Columbia University 56 years to the day after police crushed an anti–Vietnam War protest at the school — are eerily evocative of that bygone era.
As someone who was involved in a minor way in the earlier protests (mostly as a member of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), I’m both fascinated by the comparisons and alert to the very big differences between the vast and nearly decadelong demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the nascent movement we’re seeing today. Here’s how they compare from several key perspectives.
While early protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza were often centered in Arab American and Muslim American communities, the latest wave is principally college-campus-based, albeit widespread, as the Washington Post reported:
“The arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on April 18 set off the latest wave of student activism across the country.
“The outbreak of nearly 400 demonstrations is the most widespread since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. From the Ivy League to small colleges, students have set up encampments and organized rallies and marches, with many demanding that their schools divest from Israeli corporations.”
The size of these protests has ranged from the hundreds into the thousands, but they can’t really be regarded as a mass phenomenon at this point.
There are, however, similarities to the earliest phase of the anti–Vietnam War movement: the campus-based “teach-ins” of 1965 (the year U.S. ground troops were first deployed in Vietnam). These began at the University of Michigan and then went viral, as a history compiled by students of the university recalled:
“The March 1965 teach-in at the University of Michigan inspired a wave of more than fifty similar teach-ins at universities around the nation and directly challenged the Johnson administration’s ability to shape public opinion about the War in Vietnam. At Columbia University, just two days after the UM event, professors held an all-night teach-in attended by 2,000 students …
“At UC-Berkeley, after an overflow crowd attended the initial UM-inspired teach-in, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a second outdoor event that drew 30,000 students.”
The anti–Vietnam War movement soon outgrew its campus origins as the war intensified and U.S. deployments soared. By 1967, monster rallies and marches were held in major cities — notably a New York march that attracted an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 protesters and a San Francisco rally that filled Kezar Stadium. At the New York event, the expansion of the antiwar movement to encompass elements of the civil-rights movement that had in part inspired the early protesters was exemplified by the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., who had just made his first overtly antiwar speech at Riverside Church.
By then the antiwar movement was beginning to attract support from a significant number of politicians, mostly Democrats but some Republicans.
The pro-Palestinian protest movement could eventually grow to this scale and breadth of support, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The fight to end American involvement in Vietnam lasted as long as the war itself; protests began in 1964, grew to include a mainstream congressional effort to cut off U.S. military aid, and continued as the South Vietnam regime collapsed in 1975. It had multiple moments of revived participation. Once such moment was Moratorium Day in October 1969, when an estimated 2 million Americans joined antiwar demonstrations once it became clear that Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the war begun by Lyndon Johnson. Another was the massive wave of protests in May 1970 when Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia; student walkouts and strikes occurred on around 900 college campuses and students were killed in Ohio and Mississippi.
It’s unclear whether the pro-Palestinian protests have anything like that kind of staying power. That’s a significant issue, since the goal shared by many protesters — a fundamental shift in the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians — could be harder to execute than an end to the Vietnam War.
Most pro-Palestinians protesters have embraced multiple demands and goals: an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza; termination of U.S. military assistance to Israel; and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Campus-based protesters have also called for termination of university investments in companies operating in Israel and, in some cases, closure of academic partnerships with Israeli institutions.
If this is going to become a sustained movement rather than a scattershot series of loosely connected local protests, some clarification of tangible goals will be necessary. Some of these aims are more achievable than others. If, for example, the Biden administration and the Saudis succeed in negotiating a significant cease-fire that temporarily ends the carnage in Gaza, does that take the wind of out of the sails of protesters seeking a definitive withdrawal of support for Israel? That’s unclear at this point.
For the most part, the anti–Vietnam War protest movement had one principal goal: the removal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam. Yes, factions of that movement expanded their goals to include such war-adjacent issues as university divestment from firms manufacturing weapons, closure of ROTC programs, draft resistance, and non-war-related issues like Black empowerment and anti-poverty efforts. But there was never much doubt that bringing the troops home was paramount.
One of the reasons for a perception of unfocused goals in the current wave of protests stems from organizers with more radical positions and rhetoric than some of their followers. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, two major groups helping organize pro-Palestinian protests subscribe to ideologies incompatible with mainstream support:
“The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets …
“A second group that has helped organize the demonstrations at Columbia is called Within Our Lifetime. Like SJP, WOL takes an uncompromising eliminationist stance toward Israel, even calling for ‘the abolition of zionism.’”
This was intermittently an issue in the anti–Vietnam War movement, particularly as such campus-based pioneers of protests as Students for a Democratic Society drifted into Marxist sectarianism. I vividly recall an antiwar march I attended in Atlanta in 1969 wherein the organizers (mostly from the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance) put Vietcong flags at either end of the march and controlled bullhorns bellowing slogans like “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is gonna win,” referring to the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This effectively turned a peace rally into something very different.
But over time, the extremist wing of the anti–Vietnam War movement went its own way, falling prey to fragmentation (the collapse of SDS into at least three factions that included the ultraviolent and Maoist Weatherman group epitomized its self-marginalization) and irrelevance. If the pro-Palestinian protest movement is to last, it needs to shed its more extreme elements.
There was never any doubt that anti–Vietnam War protesters were talking about something that vitally affected Americans, even if it took them a while to get on board. 2.7 million American citizens served in the Vietnam War with 58,000 losing their lives. 1.9 million young Americans were conscripted into the military during that war. While what Americans did to the people of Indochina wasn’t often called “genocide,” millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, and the humanitarian disaster did increasingly trouble the consciences of many people not directly affected by the conflict. As many military leaders and reactionary politicians bitterly argued for decades, U.S. public opinion eventually ended the Vietnam War.
While the rise in sympathy for Palestinians and support for some sort of cease-fire has been palpable as deaths soar in Gaza, it remains unclear how invested Americans are in any sort of policy change toward the conflict. Yes, unhappiness with Joe Biden’s leadership in this area is a real political problem for him, but much of the unhappiness stems from conservatives (particularly conservative Evangelicals) who want stronger support for Israel. And the effort to make this issue an existential threat to Biden’s renomination during the 2024 Democratic primaries failed in contrast to the major role played by anti–Vietnam War sentiment in sidelining LBJ in 1968.
Making Gaza a crucial issue in American politics grows more challenging to the extent protesters choose more radical goals, like a single secular (i.e., non-Zionist) Palestinian state. And at the same time, more modest goals could undermine the strength and unity of the protest movement if protesters reject half-measures (much as anti–Vietnam War protesters rejected “Vietnamization,” phony peace talks, and other steps that prolonged the war).
Arguably, the many sacrifices and eventual triumph of anti–Vietnam War protesters were more than offset by a conservative backlash that treated the “disorder” and alleged lack of patriotism associated with protests as a social malady to be remedied with heavy-handed repression. In the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the two candidates who engaged in law-and-order rhetoric and often espoused more violent steps to win the war, won 57 percent of the national popular vote. Other successful conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan made crackdowns on “coddled” student protesters a signature issue.
Today, Donald Trump and other Republicans are eagerly making pro-Palestinian protests part of a law-and-order message aimed at both student protesters and the “elite” faculty and administrators who are allegedly encouraging them. If protesters deliberately or inadvertently help Trump get back into the White House, they may soon encounter a U.S. administration that makes “Genocide Joe” Biden’s look like an oasis of pacific benevolence.
I have nothing important to add except this:
In January 1942, Winston Churchill met with Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard an American battleship in the Atlantic. The topic was allied unity. Churchill agreed to expand Britain’s war against Japan if Roosevelt agreed that the defeat of Germany would be first. Both men agreed that, even though each side had to make some sacrifices, it served both their interests to work together. Therefore, each agreed to the others demands.
Later when a reporter asked Churchill how the meeting with Roosevelt went, he held up the V sign with his fingers.
“What does that mean?” The reporter asked.
“Victory,” Churchill replied.
Apparently, Kerry has settled on a campaign theme: ‘Let America be America again’.
What’s really interesting about the theme is that it is conservative in the true sense of the word. And it so aptly fits our current circumstance, in which a radical administration has taken a dull chainsaw to the carefully built edifice of American institutions and values.
on a topic closely related to ideological coherence and democratic party commonality, check out Mark Schmitt’s article from the American Prospect:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7765
The best quote of which:
“Liberalism is different from conservatism, not its mirror. Liberalism thrives when it has an opportunity to experiment, to debate, to test ideas. And when, in a time of futility, we also cut ourselves off from the historical roots of our ideas, we lose the benefit of the experience and experimentation that has gone before.”
I’m w/ paleo on this. bush has got to go and I’m willing to strike almost any bargain w/i the democratic party to ensure that.
but I wonder if what divides dyed-in-the-wool liberals from the DLC is the very reason dems have been on the shit end of the electoral stick for the last 15 years: namely, an utter absence of ideological cohesion.
true, dems need to entertain differing viewpoints but I think there’s ample evidence that the democratic party is more accurately described as a coalition of interests; the existence of southern democrats argues for that nomenclature.
I’m not convinced the party can ever meaningfully bridge its own internecine gulf. and maybe for the next 6 months we don’t need to. but after november, particularly if kerry loses, this divide—-however paper-overed it may have temporarily been—will need to be acknowledged, addressed, and redressed in some lasting way. otherwise, it’s deja vu all over again for the often hapless democratic party.
I’ve got great respect for Dionne, so I’m anxious to read his suggestions.
Coincidentally to the subject of this thread, Bob Novak has published the following article on Republican DIS-unity:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20040520.shtml
As to our democratic discussion, I will just say (after Lincoln):
“If we do not hang together, we will all hang, seperately.”
Whatever the divide is and which wing wins is irrrelvant. Let’s have the debate from the cat-bird seat. Let’s have some accomplishments without ideal goals rather than no accomplishments with ideal goals. Let us make it our agenda which will be implemented and we can debate which aspect to focus when in the process of implementing. Ariana Huffington says it well, “when you house is on fire, now is not the time to discuss remodeling.”
Coach, I don’t agree. I think the Republican party is far more united. When it comes to foreign policy and economic policy, little division. Only when it comes to the social issues is there a split, but they’ve managed to (1) reduce the emphasis of those issues within the party and (2) social liberals represented a smaller and smaller slice of the party.
While Democrats have general agreement on the social issues, they are far more split on the other two. When it comes to foreign policy, they are split over Iraq and interventionism in general. And a new split is emerging under the surface over the party’s continuing lockstep march with Israel. When it comes to economic policy, the division between the balanced budget/”free trade” wing and the greater spending/fair trade wing is more like a chasm. Should the Democrats get back in power, those divisions will reassert themselves with a vengeance.
There are serious differences in emphasis between the two wings, and these can lead to serious confilt, because one group might get their way while another does not.
For instance, the DLC is serious about courting investors and the business community. For them, Fiscal sanity is much more important than tax reform that denefits the middle class and working class. For Liberals, who are primarily interested in social justice for the working class and middle class, tax reform that benefits these groups is more important than a return to fiscal sanity.
Now both groups can agree they want both these things, but they actually are somewhat contradictory (not necessarily, but it would be easier to achieve either one if you didn’t achieve the other). Now, the Liberals have to worry that, because of a Republican House (and probable Republican Senate), the DLC will get what it wants most, a return to fiscal sanity, but the Liberals won’t get what they want most, tax reform benefiting the middle class and working class.
IF we actually realize the agenda in the article, it would be a huge success, in light of the Republicans desire to stop us from achieving any of it. My fear is that we will have a return of the Clinton years, where the centrists and DLC achieved so many more of their goals than the Liberals. While Clinton was much better than Bush, he was in many ways NOT ideal, and I think in some ways helped laid the groundwork for 2000.
But paleo, the fundamental differences are strategic or can be resolved empirically. These kinds of debates are healthy in general, if they are thought of that way, and both sides look for ways to productively make their case.
The goals, though, are very much the same.
I do not think the same can be said for the splits in the Republican party ( more of a theocracy, more of a libertarian govt.)
Party unity is always a good thing. I think it will be vital to the presidential election. Now we need to get the Nadar people on board.
But the “papering over” is the whole point of the piece. If Dems can make nice and stop quarreling long enough to regain the White House (and maybe the Senate), they can resume their internecine quibbles AFTERWARDS. The problem now is: What to do about Ralph Nader, with his long history of undercutting Democratic presidential candidates and a proven (2000) ability to pull aways crucial votes from the party?
Sorry. But there are fundamental differences between Progressive and DLC Democrats. They might be papered over in an election year. But afterwards, win or lose, they will reemerge. Kuttner’s and Marshall’s fuzzy and lowest common denominator article notwithstanding.