My Thoughts on the Columbia University Protests

I was 19-years-old when I attended my first protest.  It was (and I'm giving you a pretty decent idea of my age here) against the Iraq War.  I stood on the sidewalk of Snelling Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in St. Paul, holding a sign basically espousing that the Iraq War was wrong, an illegal war (something like that...I am not artistic so I am confident I didn't make my own sign).  I can still remember the reactions, though.  There were people who honked in support, there were people who honked that they were not supportive.  This was relatively early in the Iraq War (before it became popular to be against it), so there were more of the latter than the former.  I remember people yelling, one person spat from their car, and I definitely got a couple of "go back to Russia's" which made no sense in the context, but I would learn in the years that followed is sort of a stupid person's response to anything they perceive as anti-American during a protest.

In the years since, I have marched, protested, & written letters on behalf of a variety of causes, ranging from local issues (like specific campus policies my school had) to more national issues like gay marriage or Black Lives Matter.  I walked in the Women's March in 2017, by-far the largest march I've ever been a part of doing.  As I've gotten older, my attitude toward public marches have changed, understanding that what this is about is rarely about actual, tangible change (that happens through legislation, which ultimately happens through voting, not through marches or public revolt in the United States), and is more about a public expression of disgust with a specific policy, putting on record that this is important to me and the people I'm protesting with, and that we will be remembering this when it comes to primary season (and that we expect a public statement from the public officials we are talking toward).

I say this because the protests at Columbia University have, to my mind, become something of a murky waters situation online, and I wanted to try and make sense of it.  I have not written much about the situation in Gaza on this blog for a few reasons.  First, foreign policy is not my area of expertise-I am much stronger when it comes to discussions of domestic policy, or specifically, elections analysis.  Second, I find that this is a situation where you need to have a nuanced opinion.  The attacks on October 7th needed some sort of response, and the US has one primary ally in the region (Israel) that they cannot strategically abandon just because Netanyahu is a truly terrible leader (which you should be able to say without this being equated to antisemitism-Netanyahu is not Israel, and he is certainly not the people of Israel, who like the people of Palestine, deserve peace).  I support a ceasefire, but I also understand that that is what Joe Biden is trying to achieve with a delicate diplomatic situation, and that blaming Biden for almost any of this is a bit like blaming the president for gas prices.  Biden is not the King of the World, despite what some media will say, and other countries do have autonomy-there's only so much he can do, and putting economic sanctions on Israel is an extremely shortsighted solution given their position as an ally.  I'll be real-I think people expect Biden to have done more than he legally or practically could do in this situation.

And the third is that I understand that, while complicated, the actions of the protesters at Columbia University are not going to help.  This is a hard conversation to have, but for the bulk of Americans, while they support public protest in the forms of marches, letters, or peacefully assembling, they don't support other things that frequently come out of these events.  Destruction of public or private property, illegal squatting in buildings, and purposefully blocking traffic-these are not popular, and frequently have the unintended consequence of not helping the cause, adding more detractors than anything, and making your side look extreme (which makes politicians not want to align with it).  Oftentimes this is a challenging conversation to have.  What does a few broken windows matter compared to the atrocities happening in Gaza, or a few years ago, the actions endured by George Floyd?  They don't compare, and they shouldn't be compared.  But that doesn't mean that they accomplish what you want them to-most people don't think that way (public polling consistently bears this out).  They think "how will breaking those windows help anything?" because, well, it usually doesn't.  I watched with shock yesterday on Twitter as people said that Joe Biden had made a mistake in his public speech, condemning the actions of the protesters, thinking that Columbia University and the New York Police Department acted disproportionately to the situation, and that was more important.  They claimed what he was doing was "political suicide."  But it wasn't...if Biden loses because of the protesters abandoning support for him (despite Trump being much worse on this particular issue for the left, but that's a conversation for a different day), that's a possible consequence of this, but siding with the protesters breaking the law...that would've been political suicide.  Forget that the president (of either party) can never condone people breaking the law (he's the president-he has to support following the law)-the protesters are not popular, it wouldn't be politically expedient.  Had he sided against the police department enforcing the law (for the record, not condoning how extreme they were, just pointing out that was what they were technically doing in this case), that would've been the end of his presidency.

When it comes to a ceasefire, Biden is working behind the scenes (I'm confident...this is also politically expedient for him, not to mention a general reflection of his diplomatic policy), to make that happen, but ultimately it will be Netanyahu who makes that decision.  Biden cannot force him to do that.  But I do want to call out for progressives who feel forlorn with this-the biggest wins that we have had as a movement over the past few decades have been almost entirely as a result of coordinated ballot initiatives and strategic decisions with elections.  The current Democratic Party is more progressive than it has been since the 1930's, and Joe Biden (whether you want to admit or not) is the most liberal president the country has had economically since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and socially-ever.  Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Catholic from Scranton, Pennsylvania, is easily our most socially progressive president.  That didn't happen on its own.  It happened through giving him a Congress he basically had to move to the left with.  Progressives' biggest wins (true wins, that resulted in real change) in the past 15 years have been through a coordinated effort to elect more liberal candidates in blue seats, even if that means ousting incumbents (think of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marie Newman getting real power in Congress by having a voice that has power behind it, and ousting incumbent Democrats from their left), or ousting Republicans with real progressives and not just middle-of-the-road Democrats (Elizabeth Warren & Katie Porter, two dominant figures of the new progressive movement, got their current offices by ousting Republican members-of-Congress).  The biggest win of all would surely be the power of Bernie Sanders' presidential runs.  Though he didn't win, he forced Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to move left in order to beat him, and because Biden became president (again, with the support of countless progressives), he was able to take some of Sanders' policies and make them law.  Public opinion in the past 15 years on gay marriage, the Affordable Care Act, marijuana legalization, and most recently issues like climate change & abortion rights, have shifted in large part due to a singular, specific message, and a movement to get the right people into office to impact change.  And in cases like gay marriage and the ACA, having those people in office have given the US some of their signature progressive domestic policy wins.

Ultimately, while protest is part of the American tradition, those electoral wins are the ultimate solve.  No matter how angry you feel, when it comes to making real change in the United States, the solution is usually the same-you hold no greater power to help advance the causes you believe in than when you are holding a ballot.  And choosing not to use that, or to vote for a candidate you know can't win...that's throwing that power away, and makes a mockery of the cause you are championing.