Does the Left Think Young Left-Wing Protesters Matter or Not?
Theo Baker’s ‘Atlantic’ story prompted progressives to complain about scrutinizing left-wing college students. But they’ve been demanding President Biden heed those activists on Gaza. If they have power, they deserve scrutiny.
This week, The Atlantic published an account of how the war between Israel and Hamas has convulsed a campus (in this case, that of the author, Stanford sophomore Theo Baker). The most explosive details in the story showed activists endorsing violence or anti-Semitism, which has fed directly into the cycle of anger and fear felt by both Jewish and Muslim students.
This has predictably set off the same progressive eye-rolling that occurs any time the mainstream media reports on crazy things happening on the left. “Incredibly brave for the son of the NYT White House correspondent to put out a piece narcing on his fellow students and teachers,” snarked Daniel Boguslaw, a reporter at the Intercept, a staunchly anti-Israel publication. (Baker is the son of two successful journalists, though he made his reputation breaking a scandal that toppled Stanford’s president.) Numerous complaints described Baker as a “snitch” picking on unimportant targets.
The argument that nobody should pay attention to what left-wing radicals are saying on campus is totally at odds with the message that progressives have been frantically sending since almost immediately after October 7. A slew of stories has covered the anger felt by the young progressive left at the Biden administration. Those stories have been filled with pleas from organizers that Biden heed the protesters’ demands. “Don’t blame us. [Biden] needs votes from Arab Americans, from people of color, from progressive Jews, and from young people. He only won Michigan by 150,000 votes in 2020, so politically we have a moment where we can raise our voices,” said Andy Levin, a leader of the push to get Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary. Waleed Shaid warned that Biden is “not representing the 80 percent of Democrats who want a cease-fire, or the Muslims and Arabs and young people whose votes put him in office and are now out protesting his policies in the streets.”
There are two popular notions on the progressive left that seem intellectually irreconcilable. The first is that the media should stop scrutinizing radical left-wing ideas by progressive college students and political activists. The second is that the Democratic Party must heed the demands of progressive college students and political activists.
The first idea has a longer pedigree. When I wrote about the rise of illiberal left-wing thought in progressive spaces nine years ago, a common response from progressives who didn’t wish to defend the ideas I criticized was that it was not worth attention or concern because it was just youthful high jinks from “college teens.” This dismissive response has aged poorly. It was not even true at the time: Many of the incidents in my story concerns adult professionals, not college students. In any case, it was obvious that the driving force was not age but ideology.
But the exasperated pose of dismissing criticism of young radical activists has not gone away. It is irresistible as a way to smooth over tensions within the progressive coalition, or any coalition. When your allies say or do something you can’t defend, but you don’t want to cause a rupture, the path of least resistance is to insist their actions are unimportant and don’t require scrutiny. This has been the method mainstream Republicans have used to ignore just about every one of Donald Trump’s offenses.
Of course, the fact that the allies won’t denounce the behavior of their allies is the biggest giveaway that the behavior isn’t marginal. If it was limited to a handful of powerless kooks, they’d be free to call it out.
On the left, progressive-coalition managers spent years denying the campus left was worthy of attention before declaring their anger an emergency that Joe Biden had to attend to. The left went from too powerless to merit scrutiny to too powerful to be ignored overnight, without even a day in between when it was fair game for criticism.
Obviously, young people deserve more grace than middle-aged adults, and shouldn’t be permanently defined by thoughtless positions they took at the outset of their intellectual formation. But you can grant them some forbearance and also have confidence that their wildest impulses will likely mellow at least somewhat over time, while still taking seriously the ideas they are absorbing and spreading.
Taking the activist left seriously on Gaza does not mean defining the whole movement by its most extreme manifestations. Many of the progressive activists angry with Biden are motivated purely by humanitarian sympathy with the Palestinian people. (Indeed, we ought to distrust anybody who isn’t troubled by the death and suffering that Israel and Hamas have inflicted on innocent Palestinians.)
But those extreme manifestations are an important and hardly marginal element of the movement. The eliminationist rhetoric and heckler’s-veto tactics described in Baker’s story are standard features in the movement.
This week, Salma Hamamy, president of the main pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Michigan, shared (and then deleted) a social-media message stating, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” (The University sent an email denouncing the message.)
While she may be an undergrad, Hamamy is hardly anonymous. She was one of four undergraduates to receive the University of Michigan’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award honoring students “who best exemplify the leadership and extraordinary vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” The Michigan Daily endorsed her campaign for student-council president. State, national, and international newspapers have quoted her warning Biden to change course and citing her as an example of the kind of progressive Democrats have to placate.
Last month, the New York Times jointly profiled her and a pro-Israel activist in a story presenting both as searching for common humanity. “As dusk neared, they walked alone to a nearby campus building and sat together on a bench. Maybe this would be a chance to recognize one another’s humanity,” the Times reported. “He needed to know why anti-Israel protesters had not forcefully condemned the deaths of Israeli civilians.”
I think that mystery has been cleared up.
No serious person is proposing that Biden go all the way to denouncing Israel as an illegitimate settler-colonist entity. There is room to debate degrees of movement within his stance. The point is that the amount of attention that’s been devoted to presenting left-wing pro-Palestinian activists as a powerful and even potentially decisive faction in national politics implies the need for a proportionate level of scrutiny of their ideas. To insist these activists only matter when you are touting their influence, and then to deny their power when they receive scrutiny, is a tactic posing as an ideal.