Five Ways Campus Turmoil Hurts Democrats and America Charles Lipson
Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.
Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.
Parents don’t understand why their kids aren’t being protected. They are unhappy that classes have been canceled and graduation ceremonies relegated to Zoom. They are dismayed that their tax money is being flushed down a sinkhole of anti-American propaganda. They wonder what in the world has happened to once-respected institutions. Good question.
These problems are bad news for Democrats generally. That they come in an election year gives them immediacy. Support for terrorists on the part of students and some faculty, combined with huge, sometimes violent, demonstrations hurts Democrats in several ways.
The first, and most obvious, is that Democrats and universities are seen as ideological soulmates. That association is particularly prominent in Ivy League schools, Stanford, and flagship state universities, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. It is pervasive in the humanities division at every school, from Princeton to Northeast Podunk State. You are as likely to find a Republican professor of English as a Republican at NPR.
If faculty members kept their lockstep ideological fervor to themselves, their courses would be properly insulated from partisan politics. They aren’t. In fact, faculty are happy to proclaim their views in class and, worse, to insist their students fall in line. Many professors are proud ideologues, intolerant of other views. Some are outright propagandists. They expect students to parrot those views or pay the price. That’s wrong. It’s a betrayal of what higher education should be.
The public can now see this bias thanks to campus demonstrations. They can see the pernicious effects of identity politics, dividing the world into the “oppressed” (who are deemed righteous) and the “oppressors” (who are deemed guilty), based solely on their identity. They can see the sneering contempt for alternative views, or even common sense.
This repressive, illiberal campus culture is a grievous problem for universities. It has become a problem for Democrats, too, because they have been so close to universities for so long. They cannot escape that association now that it has turned toxic. That’s true even though most mainstream Democrats are appalled by the violence and intolerance they see on campus. Yet they are inextricably linked to it in the public mind, with no easy escape.
Trying to sever that link entails serious political risks. Part comes from deepening the split between mainstream politicians and the party’s far-left wing on Capitol Hill, led by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and “the Squad.” (The split is so deep and obvious that the New York Times actually ran a story about it.) It’s a misnomer to call those hard-left representatives “progressive.” What’s progressive about supporting students who wave Hamas flags and march through the library shouting antisemitic slogans?
They are rightly called the “far left.” They may be a relatively small group in Congress, but they carry disproportionate weight, just as the far right does among Republicans. Remember how Matt Gaetz led a small band to oust Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy? Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene and two or three others threaten his successor, Mike Johnson. Both right and left have the same source of leverage. When Congress and the country are as closely divided as they are, then any small, cohesive group can threaten the majority’s control. They can do it in Congress, and they can do it in swing states.
For Democratic Party leaders, the far-left presents a serious problem, and party leaders know it. They understand how much the campus demonstrations and open sympathy for terrorists hurt them. Decency demands that they denounce that intimidation, violence, and sympathy for terrorists in forthright terms without adding some tepid statement about moral equivalence, as Joe Biden did in his last public comment.
Why so mealy-mouthed? Because moral clarity might cost them hotly contested swing states. The electoral risk doesn’t just come from disaffected Muslim voters. It comes from young voters, who have moved much further left than their parents. The Squad is their bullhorn in Congress.
This shift among younger voters shows up in poll after poll. According to a recent Pew survey, 33% of younger Americans (ages 18-29) sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis (14%). Support for Israel increases steadily by age bracket. Among Americans over 65, for instance, 47% sympathize more with Israelis, only 9% with Palestinians.
The difference between parties is stark. Among younger people who lean Republican, sympathy for Israelis is more than twice as high as that for Palestinians. Among Republicans over 50 years old, only 3% sympathize more with Palestinians. Not so with Democrats. Younger ones overwhelmingly favor the Palestinians. Only 7% sympathize more with Israelis, 47% with Palestinians. (“The weak must be right. The powerful must be wrong.”) The only Democrats who tilt in Israel’s favor are those over 65 (25% to 17% in Israel’s favor, with the rest saying they sympathize equally with both groups).
These numbers pose hard choices for Democratic Party leaders, who are trying their best to evade them. The outcome of the presidential election could hinge on a relatively small number of Arab American voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and younger voters in seven swing states. They might not be willing to vote for Trump, but they could support a third-party candidate or refuse to go to the polls. Either choice could spell doom for Biden and some Senate candidates. Jill Stein just burnished her credentials with those constituencies by getting arrested at a pro-Palestine event. Can Cornel West be far behind?
Democrats don’t have a solution for this problem, which pits the center-left plus independents against the far-left plus Arab Americans. That cleavage is the ballot-box equivalent of the 7-10 split in bowling. The more you target the 7, the less likely you are to make the 10, and vice versa. The more Democrats move to the center to assuage median voters, the more they alienate younger ones on the left and Arab Americans.
Third, the president’s effort to appeal to younger voters by forgiving student loans links the party even more tightly – and prominently – to universities at a time when many voters are disgusted by those institutions. The problem goes beyond Joe Biden blatantly ignoring Supreme Court rulings on student loans, concerning as that contempt for our constitutional order is. He surely knows his policy will be smacked down, once again, by the courts. His goal, however, is not to provide genuine debt relief but to show students and indebted graduates that he really, really supports them and Republicans don’t. Biden’s aim is to convey that message and get past November before the courts overturn his giveaway.
Fourth, voters can see how leniently violence and disruptions are treated in blue states and blue cities by “Soros” DAs and attorneys general. If students are arrested in those jurisdictions, they are quickly released. No charges are filed. The predictable effect is to encourage more disruptions, more violence, and less education. Since those jurisdictions are led by Democrats, the party pays a price among centrist voters, who, oddly enough, believe universities should be sites of education.
That brings us to a final, crucial point. Voters will tolerate only so much disorder. They believe, quite correctly, that the provision of social order is a primary responsibility of government at all levels, city, state, and federal. That’s why disorder, especially violent disorder, always hurts the party in power. When elected officials fail to meet that basic responsibility, voters hold them accountable. Those voters believe (again, correctly) that order can be restored on campus and city streets without trampling the right to speak freely and assemble peacefully.
The current disruptions are likely to ebb in a few weeks, as universities complete final exams. Unfortunately, the respite is only temporary. Violence and disorder will return in full force this summer when the two parties hold their conventions, the Republicans in Milwaukee (in mid-July), the Democrats in Chicago (in mid-August). What could possibly go wrong in Chicago?
Expect chaos, violence, support for terrorists, and hatred of both Israel and America. The disruptions may return to campus this fall, in the midst of the election season. That will depend partly on whether the war in Gaza continues and partly on whether students face any punishment for their disruptions. No punishment, no deterrence.
If President Biden could issue an executive order suspending all classes until mid-November, he would issue it today. If he could forgive all college loans, he would do it with a stroke of the pen. And he would hand all new graduates a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Alas for Biden and his party, he cannot. He is not an emperor. In fact, more and more voters think he is marching down the street with no clothes.
Comments are closed.
