Event Glamour: The Students Revolt

The problem with British history, said Salman Rushdie, is that so much of it happened abroad. By way of revision, we might say that the problem with American politics today is that all of it is happening abroad. University campuses across the continental breadth of the United States have become vicarious cockpits for an intractable Levantine conflict raging half a world away while the President himself increasingly resembles Ceaușescu on the balcony, waving with the twilit tranquility of advanced senescence at a country split by the fissure which the Israel/Hamas war and its ancillary domestic student revolts have carved into America’s political topography.

In 1938, Neville Chamberlain could breezily dismiss the looming Czech crisis as a “quarrel in a faraway country between people of which we know nothing.” In 2024, the most fateful American presidential election in a generation may yet be decided by the optics of a faraway quarrel of which we now hear little else.

It might be countered from the outset that America has, sort of, been here before: most obviously, the moral bifurcation over Vietnam. And with regard to the students, it might likewise fairly be asked: What’s new? The iconography of the 1960s has accustomed us to the notion that campuses have always been a playroom for pseudo-revolutionaries who never get past their larval stage. But we were always able to console ourselves with the not unrealistic expectation that they would, and often did, Grow Out Of It. Which is to say, there were always enough adult opinions in the room to put a check on the fever and act as an antiviral once the malady escaped from campus and entered the temperate authenticity of the real world. (READ MORE from Phillip Mark McGough: Haiti Will End in Blood. It Is Better Left Alone.)

This time round however the real world — by which if we mean anything we mean the world of adult opinion and adult responsibilities, the consensus reality of common sense — no longer exists. The left’s long march through the institutions, commenced by that self-same radicalism of the 1960s and abetted en route by unprecedented demographical change, has reached its terminus and planted its flag: well might the left weep, for there are no more worlds left to conquer.

Students now leave the mock-Marxist ecology of campus to enter the mock-Marxist ecology of an utterly transformed America, to consume the output of the mock-Marxist media and mouth the mock-Marxist mantras of corporate HR departments, to peer through an Overton Window which has defaulted so far to the left that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (trivial, a professional nuisance, but impeccably anti-Zionist) is harassed on the streets for her lack of pro-Hamas zeal.

Put plainly, the same student we laugh at today for demanding gluten-free food for the protestors at UCLA will one day be a personnel manager determining which intersectional violation you’ve committed and whether or not you get to keep your job. Tomorrow belongs to me, sings the golden-haired, wintry-eyed Aryan boy at the end of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. But both today and tomorrow belong to the students of Columbia, of NYU, of USC, of UCLA. With the near-full-spectrum victory of the left in the cultural sphere these past 30 years, the real world itself has become one vast, vandalised, grievance-addled, graffiti-blemished, thoroughly unserious tent-strewn college campus. All politics is now student politics.

If any measure of satisfaction is to be sought and found in this unmade bed of woe, it’s in the panicked response of the university administrators, who find themselves in a ditch dug deep by their own labors. It used to be said that all revolutions devour their own children; of the campus revolts, it might more accurately be said that the revolution is devouring its parents. These are the same universities, after all, whose professors and administrators celebrated when BLM torched the inner cities in 2020, the same universities whose tenured mandarins rested their chins on steepled fingers and debated the validity of abolishing the same police forces which they now summons in full battle dress to clear out the encampments.

Student radicalism, indeed, has hitherto been a marketing strategy for universities which explicitly sell themselves to the public as Marxist madrasas: NYU for example literally promises students via its website “a world of activism opportunities”; Columbia’s website meanwhile reminisces with revolutionary nostalgia, though with no apparent sense of embarrassment, about the more than 1,000 students protesting the Vietnam War who had to be forcibly removed by police from the Morningside campus in 1968.

These are the universities in other words which cheered when events met their own ideological ends, in the process divesting themselves of any claim to academic integrity. Transgressive behavior, garlanded as “social justice,” was greenlit, encouraged, and valorized. The BLM summer of 2020 and its concomitant violence was of utility to academia because it perpetuated, rather than challenged, long-established culturally Marxist power structures. Many students, inevitably not as au courant as their professors when it comes to unpicking the cat’s cradle of contradictions which undergirds these things, are therefore understandably puzzled as to why the universities thought it permissible and commendable for entire ghettoes to burn in 2020 while in 2024 a collection of tents on a neglected lawn are sufficient justification for police brutality. This is the predictable chaos when ideology runs ahead of its master, when the puppet becomes a real boy and begins to tug on the strings.

All this is not to attribute any degree of logic, consistency, or even sincerely-held moral seriousness to the students themselves. Performative extremism, what the philosopher Sidney Hook called “ritualistic liberalism,” refracted via the lens of social media, has become the blight of our century, bringing to mind the social critic Max Nordau’s diagnosis of the two sure signs of civilizational degradation: mania and mysticism.

By mania he meant a retreat into coddled self-absorption, a morbid preoccupation with one’s own inner emotional life and its ceaseless projection into the external world, and by mysticism the seeking of salvation in a new revelatory gnosis, a transformative vision which not only sidesteps reality but supplants it altogether in the mind of the believer. We think of the unrelenting succession of half-real, half-fabulous moral panics, like the witch crazes of old Europe, which have bludgeoned our senses these past few years alone: BLM, the “unconscious racism” which only “racism experts” can scry, COVID apocalypticism, gender dysphoria, the Russian menace, latterly Gaza. Freud’s “Reality Principle” has crumbled.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why the campus protests, for all their heat and noise, still feel oddly tepid, somehow unreal and depthless, long-distance transmissions from a cold, dead star. To be sure, the students are responding to real events, but the response itself is hyperreal (the cultural-technological process by which reality mimics and magnifies itself), the spectacle overshadowed by meta-spectacle, the phenomenon by epiphenomena.

In The Dean’s December (incidentally a novel about an academic falling foul of the self-appointed campus ideological police) Saul Bellow mused over what he called the “great modern mystery …why, in this age of communication, are we so near the border of total incoherency.” Elsewhere in the same novel he refers to “event-glamour,” whereby “the false representations of communication led to horrible distortions of public consciousness.” And Bellow wrote all this in 1982, though he might just as well have been writing with the gravity of a prophet about the series of mimetic events, replicated exponentially by social media, which has defined the period 2020 – 2024.

And it is difficult, is it not, to see the heraldry and liturgy of the students — the keffiyehs, the martyrs’ frowns, the demands for global intifada alongside demands for vegan food — and not at the same time see that there is something utterly fantastic about it, something which sits as a weary hyphen between tragedy and comedy. One example from many: At UCLA, acting on rumors that one of the pro-Palestinian protestors had a potentially fatal banana allergy, pro-Israel protestors promptly discovered a new frontier in biological warfare by wielding bananas en masse. It goes without saying that a revolution that can be jeopardized by the strategic deployment of herbaceous fruits is no revolution at all, and its foot soldiers no revolutionaries. (READ MORE: Joe Biden’s Tragic Invulnerability)

Henceforth and for the foreseeable future we can expect American politics to remain febrile with this disorder, this pollution of domestic discourse by far-off sorrows in the more fissile places of the world. As in a political manifestation of quantum entanglement, the moment violence erupts in the Middle East so we can be sure it will erupt on American campuses and rage beyond to engulf the nation in a fresh round of hashtaggable misery, until the news cycle turns to the next meta-event with its totalitarian demands on our time and attention. It is a deeply unhealthy way to live. We are in an age of synthetic sentiment, spearheaded by children, but nonetheless dangerous for all that. The beginning of wisdom here is perhaps to be found in a cautionary dictum from Robert Louis Stevenson, namely, that the sentimentalist always prepares the pathway for the brute.

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