Riots in black ghettos. Rebellions on campus. The news these past few months, and particularly in the past week, has been full of stories that remind us, as William Faulkner wrote a little more than half a century after the Civil War, that “the past is not really dead, it is not even past.”
We’re seeing something that looks eerily like a recurrence of events half a century ago that led to the destruction of American cities and campuses.
Half a century before the recent uproar at Yale and the University of Missouri, America saw protracted rioting at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the fall of 1964. Half a century before the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, America saw in Los Angeles’s Watts the first of the horrifying 1960s urban riots.
The Berkeley students’ cause was “free speech,” protesting the ban on tables in campus with electioneering material for candidates like Lyndon Johnson. Students held up signs proclaiming “do not fold, staple or mutilate,” the legend on the IBM cards then used to input data onto huge multiframe computers. In retrospect, this was a sign of the baby boom generation’s rejection of the cultural uniformity of the post-World War II years, apparent in the cultural polarization personified by 1964 freshmen Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But the rebellions that followed on multiple campuses for many years was transmogrified into many other things. Demands for banning military presence on campus, authorizing separate black organizations, firing administrators and establishing racial quotas and preferences in admissions.
In the process, campuses were transformed into leftist enclaves in the larger society, with “tenured radicals” reshaping faculty in their own image, black and Hispanic groups self-isolating into monoracial cliques and speech codes enacted to punish dissenters from campus orthodoxy. Scholarship in many areas was profoundly weakened and trivialized — a huge loss to society.
That’s the atmosphere highlighted in the frenzied protests lately at the University of Missouri, Yale, and Claremont McKenna College. Protesters are demanding high-visibility denunciations of real or imagined racial slights and the creation of “safe spaces” for students desperate not to hear opinions other than their own. If this is as representative of generational attitudes as the baby boomers’ anti-IBM card signs, we’re in for an even more polarized, less tolerant and seriously infantilized future.
Eleven months after the first Berkeley protests, the riot broke out in Watts, after an argument following the drunk driving arrest of a black motorist. It lasted for six days and was followed by dozens more over the next three years, with especially high death tolls in Newark, Detroit and Washington.
The 1968 riots ceased, but afterward violent crime exploded in the same places, destroying what had been stable black neighborhoods, retail areas and factories. Crime was vastly reduced in the late 1990s, but you can still see the damage in places like Detroit and Newark today.
Elite delegitimatization of law enforcement followed the 1960s riots, and something similar may be happening again. After the August 2014 shooting of a violent suspect in Ferguson, Mo., protests and violence erupted across the nation, and police in some cities ceased proactive patrolling. Murder rates exploded in Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee and many other cities.
The Berkeley protests came just after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and on the brink of passage of Johnson’s Great Society legislation. The Watts riot came not long after passage of the hugely effective Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today’s campus and ghetto rioting comes just as the most liberal administration since then has at least partially succeeded in “the fundamental transformation” of the nation. Liberal government seems not to squelch protest but to embolden it.
One is reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that the French Revolution arose not out of desperation but at a time of rising expectations. The defenestration of liberal university administrators is reminiscent of the Jacobins guillotining the Girondists and then being guillotined themselves. The revolution eats its own and then destroys its own redoubts.
Berkeley and Watts were followed in California by the election of Gov. Ronald Reagan, on a wave of support from a G.I. generation that financed its great universities and supported civil rights legislation. They were followed nationally by the election of Republican presidents in five of the next six elections. Will today’s sequels produce a similar response?
