Echoes of the past: US lawmakers weaponise campus protests before elections

Many Americans were shocked when police were called in to raid Palestinian solidarity encampments at universities across the country. Thousands of students have been tear-gassed, manhandled and arrested at the behest of their own school administrators over the past few months.

But this reaction, and that of the political establishment, echoes old stories and narratives of law and order, and thus is not that surprising to those who know the history of the United States.

Six decades ago, in July 1964, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for the presidential election. He would run against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat. Goldwater's campaign was anchored upon a key idea: "Crime grows faster than the population, while those who break the law are accorded more consideration than those who try to enforce the law."

On July 16, 1964, as Goldwater accepted the nomination at the Republican Convention in San Francisco, an off-duty white police officer shot dead 15-year-old Black teenager James Powell in Harlem, triggering major civil unrest for several days in the state of New York.

This would be just the first of many "long, hot summers" in the 1960s. As Democrats and Republicans struggled to show which party represented law and order amid rising crime in the United States, people participating in civil disobedience campaigns and uprisings in America's poorest neighbourhoods poured out onto American streets every summer to call for social and political justice.

Despite Goldwater's rhetoric about law and order, Johnson won the election in a landslide. In 1965, he declared what he called a "War on Crime" in the form of a massive social program, the Great Society.

Only through a "War on Poverty," Johnson claimed, could the country's crime rates be reduced. But as crime rates rose over the next few years, this argument sounded progressively less compelling for many.

Johnson ended up deploying police into disadvantaged communities, contributing to the self-fulfilling prophecy that people of colour, and especially Black people, were most responsible for growing criminality in the country.

Social protest or street crime?

Social movements, and especially the civil rights movement, were accused in this context of being responsible for creating a generalised atmosphere of disrespect for authority and the law because they advocated civil disobedience. Progressively, conservatives would succeed in erasing any difference between social protest, riots and street crime in the eyes of public opinion.

In 1968, an election year, the occupation at Columbia University and several other American campuses against the Vietnam War and the persistence of racial segregation would help conservatives sustain this rhetoric, contributing to leading Richard Nixon to win the presidential election. Fifty-six years later, in another election year, we may be seeing a very similar political process taking shape.

The pro-Palestine protests at American campuses have been, and will likely increasingly be, used by right-wing candidates in the upcoming elections. The rhetoric of Republican members of Congress in their visit to Columbia University last month laid the foundation once again for arguing that the Republican Party is the party of law and order.

"This is dangerous," Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson argued on that occasion. "We respect free speech, we respect diversity of ideas, but there is a way to do that in a lawful manner and that's not what this is."

At a time when many see the multiplication of divestment encampments in the country as a symbol of the failure of university administrations seeking to suppress the protests, it seems that many conservative candidates are instead betting on the multiplication of protests so that they can use them to substantiate their discourse on law and order.

'Permissive liberalism'

As in the 1960s, the strategy is to expose the dangers of "permissive liberalism" to American society. Also as in the 1960s, Democrats are seeking to double down and show that they are the true party of law and order. Remarkably, Biden's rhetoric on the encampments mirrors the remarks Nixon directed against the social movements of the late 1960s.

In 1968, Nixon sought to characterise civil disobedience, even if it was non-violent, as a form of action that endangered the American political system. He argued, "The sloganeering of the new violence confuses many people. That's what it intends to do. But when the slogans are stripped away, it is still violence plain and simple, cruel and evil as always, destructive of freedom, destructive of progress, destructive of peace."

Biden employed the same rhetoric against civil disobedience, arguing on May 5 that "there's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos." Even in the face of a predominantly non-violent movement, he insisted that students were using "violent methods" and that "violent protests are not protected. Peaceful protest is."

It remains to be seen if Republicans will be successful in the polls, but as the anti-protest rhetoric of both Democrats and Republicans grows more similar, the process that ushered Nixon into the White House in 1968 could repeat itself.

Lessons from history

If history teaches us anything, when Democrats seek, like Johnson, to show that they are tougher on crime and public disorder than Republicans, the voters seem to prefer the more conservative option that the latter represent. To be sure, Johnson prevailed in 1964, but this was before the historical process by which public safety became the main domestic concern of American citizens.

In the meantime, many lost hope that programs like the Great Society could represent a solution to poverty, and Biden is not currently proposing a substantive welfare agenda that could make his voters think otherwise.

By relying on the rhetoric of law and order, Biden may be paving the way to contributing not only to the re-election of Donald Trump, but also to Republican victories in gubernatorial elections.

In rallies this month, Trump has sought to deliver a strong law-and-order message in which pro-Palestine students have increasingly come to the forefront. "To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately. Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students," he has said.

Calls for law and order aside, everything seems to indicate, as the pro-Palestinian cause gains momentum and dissent is increasingly repressed, that we are approaching one of those long, hot summers of protests and uprisings that characterised the American 1960s.

The end of the academic year may bring an end to the occupations on campuses, but students will now be free to occupy the streets of American cities as they have done in the past.