Mass Protest: Where Are the Kids?

Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle-age.

—W.B. Yeats, 1910

One thing was missing at the No Kings 3 rallies last month—students and other young people. The vast majority of people who participated in No Kings were of my generation.

This is a weird inversion. The great protests of the past were student-led. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Freedom Riders of CORE were the advance guard of the 1960s civil rights movement. The great anti-war protests of the same era that ultimately led to Lyndon Johnson’s abdication were all led by the young.

So what’s happening today?

More from Robert Kuttner

Instead of students organizing against complicit adults, college presidents such as Wesleyan’s exemplary Michael Roth are hoping to rouse dormant students. Last month, Roth formally unveiled Democracy Summer, in partnership with hundreds of universities ranging from Yale and Duke to small religious institutions such as Goshen College and Trinity Washington University.

Roth reminded me that student involvement depends heavily on context. “Two years ago, students did participate in campus protests involving Palestine,” because campuses were scenes of university crackdowns; and students did lead in the Black Lives Matter protests. No Kings may not resonate, either as slogan or as a good use of time. Roth hopes that Democracy Summer will create opportunities for students to engage locally, well before Election Day, “to get trained, make connections and build community where you are.”

Meanwhile, scores of Democratic members of Congress have followed Maryland’s Jamie Raskin and are recruiting students to paid summer internships to be trained to defend democracy in the fall.

I have heard three plausible explanations for the fact that some of the young have to be prodded into protest by their elders.

One is the nature of today’s student anger. Today’s students certainly have plenty to be angry about, but President Trump is only the tip of the iceberg. If you consider what today’s students are angry about, it goes something like this: I am drowning in debt, I’ll never be able to buy a house, I’m more likely to have a series of gigs than a real job. And the planet is turning into a cinder.

That sort of anger doesn’t stimulate the urge to march. More likely, it produces despondency, despair, and passivity. What difference would marching make?

The second explanation is fear. Students have watched classmates be deported. They are all too aware of the government’s capacity for surveillance, and the complicity of many college administrations. Why stick your neck out?

And third, the minority of student radicals have more important things to do than go to marches that may not make much of a difference. They are working to shelter immigrants or demonstrating for more focused goals, such as justice for Palestinians.

“It depends on where,” says Pronita Gupta, former legislative director of the U.S. Student Association. “Where they built an ecosystem, as in Minnesota, or in the Bay Area, you do see a lot of students. But in areas where that ecosystem hasn’t been built, there’s a lot less.”

One of my students at Brandeis, very much a progressive, told me that “No Kings doesn’t have a clear political message,” and displays “the weakness of the Democratic Party in effectively opposing Trump.” In other words, the students whom you’d most expect to be marching find No Kings to be ineffective.

As another of my students, an engaged radical, put it, “I attended the first one last year. What I saw was not a protest but a party.” He added, “I can understand the fear of students, but that passivity and fear is leading to nothing. Looking back at anti-Vientnam and civil rights, people put their lives on the line.”

Even so, if Trump does deliver on his fantasy of seizing the election machinery this November, we are going to need millions of students and other Americans to put their lives on the line, because democracy will be on the line.

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