Speculative fiction author Ursula K Leguin wrote not that long ago that the reason her genre of writing will only grow more important in the days ahead is because possibilities of living differently than we do will grow more remote, become more repressed in our consciousness. We need a literary genre that can “remember freedom” because the primary project of an authoritarian social order is to destroy people’s memory of the past and, thereby, their ability to imagine a different future. A place that this reality has welled-up to confront us is in the various Palestine solidarity campus encampments around the United States.
I want to make clear that I am speaking specifically to the situation in the US and not to Palestine solidarity or campus protest dynamics elsewhere. That is not to say that none of my observations are applicable in those contexts but I think we are seeing something in a purer form in the US as a consequence of recent, US-specific events.
Pro-Likud elements in the Democratic and Republican parties, who insist that any criticism of the state of Israel is, axiomatically, anti-Semitic, even if made by a Zionist member of a Zionist party on the floor of the Knesset, were obviously eager to bust out all the fancy law enforcement and surveillance resources they could as soon as they got wind of these modern campus occupations.
But the thing is: the old bipartisan imperial foreign policy establishment crew are a lot smaller, older and less influential than they were. Their relevance is being temporarily shored-up in the present by the fact that a member of this group is currently the president. But he might well be the last such president. In both major parties, there is a growing number of isolationists, a growing number actively seeking détente with the other great powers and a growing number of foreign dictator fans.
But because domestic culture war issues being fought out over bodily autonomy (i.e. Team Prison Rape/Forced Jab vs. Team Forced Birth/Antivaxx) is the main structuring feature of day-to-day American politics, the détentists, isolationists and foreign dictator fans in the Republican Party simply could not resist throwing in with the old Military-industrial Complex buddies like Lindsay Graham and Joe Manchin on this one, given most protesters’ predilection for blue hair and to match their blue face masks. Almost on aesthetic grounds alone, governor Greg Abbott was drawn into calling out the troops to pointlessly assault a bunch of University of Texas students who, let’s be clear, were not going to show up for class that day anyway.
Throughout the US, university and college administrators responded to encampments with wholly unnecessary, gratuitous assaults on students and, more generally, on fundamental civil rights to free movement, assembly, association and speech.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that, aside from some as-yet-unfulfilled threats and sabre-rattling at the University of Toronto, no equivalent crackdown has taken place in Canada. I think part of the reason for that is that Canada’s populist right learned good lessons from the experience of the Convoyists and had no appetite for throwing in with the establishment authoritarians just for the chance to deliver a punch in the mouth to a social movement they find odious.
So, let’s be fair: campus protesters in the US have faced a more authoritarian response to their activities than elsewhere. Even campuses where local government and campus administration have not responded punitively or abridged the students’ rights, students reasonably feel a solidarity with their comrades on other campuses where this has happened and no doubt fear, to a greater or lesser extent, that just because they have escaped retaliation now, this may not hold indefinitely.
Nevertheless, what I find most upsetting about these protests is the way in which the occupations have instinctively and immediately acted to abridge people’s mobility, assembly, association and speech rights in the areas over which they have assumed control. Checkpoints, racial profiling, segregation, no-go zones, constant surveillance, security personnel patrols and a host of other practices are spreading through the territories controlled by the protest camps.
More disturbing still is that, unlike Black Lives Matter or Occupy camps, regulatory protocols are not coming out of some kind of quasi-democratic, participatory deliberation or out of a clearly identified leadership/organizer class. These practices are autocthonous, immanent properties of a 2020s protest camp.
Some people in the camps just feel naturally called-upon to set up check points at which they can check IDs, interrogate people and administer loyalty oaths. Some people just enjoy filming potential interlopers to their encampment as they sit outside their tents or on blankets. For people like me, who come out of a different generational protest tradition, it is as though we are watching the kids who used to report us for our protests organizing protests of their own, a bunch of hall monitors creating their own little surveillance state. These behaviours are coming naturally to them and require minimal coordination.
And I want to suggest that this is because the logic of authoritarianism is becoming so deeply embedded in the children of the commissar class, that their horizon of possibilities is becoming so curtailed, that they cannot imagine a successor or replacement society that is not also an authoritarian surveillance state. Consequently, their reaction to being subject to authoritarian overreach is to counter with authoritarian overreach of their own.
This is fundamentally different than the working class Convoyist movement of Canada, which responded to authoritarian overreach by the establishment and government with exuberance and defiance, with spontaneous breaches in noise, assembly and mobility restrictions. There are, needless to say, no bouncy castles, no hot tubs, no spontaneous song and dance numbers on these campuses.
There are certainly participatory activities, ritual chants, songs and other acts, dutiful assemblies for speeches, and performances. Even my favourite of the students’ activities, their Jewish-led Passover seders, which I note my pro-Likud friends avoid talking about, were sober, somber and highly ritualized. (I nevertheless think these events were important and pro-social in and worked to combat the anti-Semitism that is always a danger in such movements.)
You may view the protests’ intervention in the escalating region-wide war that is gradually engulfing the entire Middle East, from Yemen to Iran to Lebanon positively or negatively. That is a matter for another article. There are only so many friendship-ending divisive controversies on which even I am prepared to take a public position at once.
What I can say is that the news they are delivering us about the political horizon of possibilities of young, educated Americans is very concerning indeed.
