It’s a mistake to regard youth demonstrations such as those over Israel’s war in Gaza through a lens of ’60s nostalgia. Crowds can be a force for ill as well as good.
The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question.
Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits on free speech, for example, attracts far less outrage. Indeed, people question free speech all the time: in debates about “hate speech,” campaign finance, social media and more. (Let’s not even get into the fashionableness of questioning 2nd Amendment rights).
But if I say that most protests are performative cosplay, or mass meet-ups of the angry, the radical, the lonely or the misinformed, someone is bound to point to the civil rights protests of the 1960s or the campaign for women’s suffrage, followed by a string of righteous how-dare-yous.
This gets to part of my objection. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about protesting. Organized protest is a form of speech, and, like speech, it is rightly protected by the 1st Amendment. But, also like speech, its morality — though not its legality — is wholly dependent on the content.
You have a right to say, or protest for, awful things. Invoking that right doesn’t make your view any nobler.
The Jim Crow-era civil rights protests were noble because the cause was noble.
