With the clearing of the pro-Palestinian encampments on Ivy League and other college campuses at the end of last week, the news media turned in unison to thought pieces comparing the antiwar protests of the 1960s with these student protests.

I’m sure today’s protesters like having their efforts enshrined within history, but it’s odd to be talking big-picture history for a timeline that’s barely seven months old. Some of the encampments had barely reached the plural “weeks” before being removed. The brand-new tents at Columbia seemed to have been arrayed like some aerially appealing formation for homecoming weekend. The bright white scarves still had fold creases like T-shirts given out at the start of an AIDS walk.

With the campus reporting, it’s always “the protesters” and not “the movement” because there is no movement. Columnists have noted that the Vietnam War protests also involved elite college campuses and were not effective at ending the war, but even if the Columbia students of 1968 were free agents, their objectives coincided with the anti-war movement that had been mobilized for years in the United States.

Last spring, PBS broadcast a great installment of the American Experience, The Movement and the Madman, documenting how two nationwide antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans for a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. The footage and firsthand accounts of planning these marches reveal the complexities of student coordination with the larger antiwar movement, bringing in the likes of Ralph Abernathy, William Sloane Coffin, Coretta Scott, King, and George McGovern. The reporting also dispels the idea that it was just elite colleges hatching the protesters: the boom in the opening of state and community colleges in the late 1960s brought students from all social classes to these marches.

It’s hard as a progressive to watch how naïve and fumbling many of the pro-Palestinian students sound when interviewed for global news outlets. They don’t have articulate leaders framing a narrative. They may be motivated by compassion, but they can’t get their stories straight. What is the prioritized objective: stopping U.S. government aid and institutional investment in Israel? a cease-fire? a two-state solution? the destruction of Israel? Where is these students’ social movement manifesto stating their opposition to any global conflict where genocide has been identified? This is what we learned from Occupy Wall Street: effective protesting needs to be more than just self-righteous anger. If you don’t have sequenced objectives, then it’s just kids in Crocs screaming polysyllabic words from a freshman survey class.

This disconnect between individual protesters and successful social movements brought to my mind Adam Curtis’s 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. This four-part series looks at how Freud’s ideas about our hidden primitive desires were used by corporate marketing in tandem with the U.S. government through most of the twentieth century to make us consumers rather than citizens. It shows how our cultivated identity as unique individuals has undermined a commitment to the collective welfare that characterized the New Deal.

Probably the saddest part of the series looks at how quickly the disappointed idealism of student protesters in 1969 pivoted in the 1970s to an inward-looking focus that soon became hedonistic. This quest for spiritual satisfaction all within the self was seized upon by free-market capitalism and Republicans in the 1980s and has proved devastating for our democracy. Those same student protesters were the enablers to our slide into Reaganism and the grotesque widening of U.S. income inequality.

I was struck by a clip in Curtis’s documentary in which Margaret Thatcher delivered these words to Conservatives in 1975:

Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a state computer. We believe they should be individuals. We’re all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. And we believe that everyone has the right to be unequal. But to us every human being is equally important.

It’s disconcerting to realize how acceptable such a statement would be to many people today. (You also have to wonder if this wasn’t Ridley Scott’s secondary source of inspiration for Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad.)

The Century of the Self ends with the Democratic- and Labour-driven neoliberal triumph of Y2K, but everything that’s happened since then follows the through-line of his argument—our complacency over the Iraq War and torture, the socially devastating bank bailouts of the Great Recession that failed to stop Wall Street from amping up risk, the social retreat into digital lives, the way social media tears physical communities apart, how Obama voters could also vote for Trump, the refusal to wear masks during a pandemic.

The emergence of college students as consumers and the prominence of identity politics on campuses is just the next logical installment of Curtis’s evolution of the self. Their choose-your-own-adventure childhoods primed them for their choose-your-own-emotional-vibe protesting lives, with everyone offering their own take from a menu of oppressed peoples.

The pro-Palestinian protesters don’t seem to prioritize gaining adherents by engaging them in discourse. They seem to want the peers observing them on social media to be taken by the dramatic intensity of their commitment and how much they personally are willing to sacrifice for the suffering victims. It’s performing versus persuading. Maybe they believe that scrapping traditional social movement playbooks will get them more attention, but it’s not bringing public opinion to their side.

One thing Americans seemed to agree on in the fall of 1969—in the first year of Nixon and the war’s sclerotic stalemate and after the summer of the Manson killings—was that something was leaving and something else coming in. In one of the Beatles’ slap-happy songs from 1969’s Yellow Submarine, “All Together Now,” that refrain being repeated some fifty times seems an ominous coda for a decade of togetherness. Same for this prophetic subtlety:

bompa bom . . . sail the ship,
bompa bom . . . chop the tree,
bompa bom . . . skip the rope,
bompa bom . . . look at me!

Yes—whatever else you do, look at me! §