On the New Student Politics

...Although administrations by nature are conservative, leftism now is the establishment in the academy, and that development can't possibly be good for the left's future as a political movement...

...Except for the occasional, exultant Bush supporter, the pedestrians on the campus or the nearby streets stared intently at their feet, avoiding not just conversation but eye contact...

...But there are as many possible mutual reorientations of the new politics and party politics as there are alternative currents within the major parties...

...If the lesson that Democrats draw from the 2004 election is that they must move toward the cultural center of a political axis that has no future, and that they must thus become even sterner drug warriors, social regulators, and guardians of "The Family...

...The bonds between the student right and the national Republican Party are far tighter than any comparable relationship between a leftist student organization and the Democrats, and the terms of this bargain were clear during the presidential campaign...

...Thus the current Democratic majority among students—which was, I believe, a consequence of support for Democrats within the new politics, not a resurgent left or liberalism—is as shallow as it is broad...

...As was the case during the heyday of student activism in the sixties, there is a disconnect between the politics of the students as a whole and the politics of the faculty...

...Furthermore, the very popular-frontism that is one reason for the right's current success is a strong indicator of a coming decline...

...What passes for an activist left on campus today is a direct consequence of this blunder...

...More precisely, the Democrats will drive a segment of currently engaged youth away from politics and make right-libertarianism attractive to the rest...

...What distinguishes this cause from the sixties civil rights movement is the fact that gay people are not at an obvious economic disadvantage—unlike the African Americans of the segregated South, who were stripped at birth of educational and economic opportunity by force of government, gays come from every socio economic background and attain high levels of education...

...instead, he picked up a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which we were reading, waved it around, and began a tirade on literature and American politics...

...If we vote in fewer numbers, it is because our political concerns intersect at odd angles to the traditional left-right argument...

...The solidity of the Democratic student majority obscures the fact that left-liberal politics as it is traditionally understood has a small and diminishing influence among students...

...I can't make any categorical statements about the history of student leftism...

...At precisely the same moment that the left's discourse ossified, the right put into practice several generations' worth of lessons in movementbuilding and in the construction and maintenance of a unified front...

...The campus left has, in short, become precisely what a genuinely subversive politics should abhor: sclerotic, humorless, and formally reactionary...

...DISSENT / Spring 2005 79...

...antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves...

...My teaching assistant didn't try to teach...

...Could the original advocates of speech codes have foreseen the right's embrace and utilization of the principle of limited speech that they legitimated...

...Such efforts are bound to fail...

...I had better say something about my tooeasy use of the referent of "we" in the preceding paragraph...

...it was a severe moral error, a betrayal of the free-speech movement and the related causes that motivated the radicalization of students in the first place...

...Every now and then, I saw a young man or woman slouched in a corner, sobbing...

...The Right's Self•Defeating Popular Front For all the structural and tactical advantages it enjoys—and I have mentioned nothing yet about the right's virtual monopoly on humor in political street theater (which is not to say that right-wing demonstrations succeed at being funny, but rather that it is almost exclusively the right that attempts humor at all)— the project of the campus right is trapped in a fatal contradiction...

...Young people most certainly did vote in higher numbers than they had in the recent past, just not in numbers high enough to offset the increased turnout of the Republican base...

...Despite championing the cause of a minority group, it has very little in common with liberation ideologies and spurns the excesses of so-called "queer theory...

...The gist of his rant was that studying literature was pointless in a world in which fiction is accepted as reality on so widespread a scale—in other words, the result of the election invalidated literature as a subject of study, and those who had voted for that result were simple-minded dupes...

...To call this a tactical error would be to miss the point...

...Though there are important differences, the struggle for gay rights is something like my generation's version of the civil rights struggle...

...Every presidential election is the first in which the current generation of college students is eligible to vote...

...Wards 1 and 2, which include all of Yale University's on-campus housing, had voted overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry for president...

...One dead giveaway that someone writing about the political culture of youth doesn't have a clue about our political views is the facile claim that this falling away from the ideology of earlier generations is "apathy" My peers are no more apathetic than the American electorate as a whole...

...Left, center, and yes, right as well, the prevailing consensus among college students, if vague and only halfarticulated, is the idea that powerful people older than we have perpetuated a gross injustice, and that of the two major political parties, one is contemptible in its cowardice while the 78 DISSENT / Spring 2005 STUDENT POLITICS other endorses a constitutional validation of secondclass citizenship...

...The beliefs that define it and cluster around it—recognition of gay rights, abolition of arbitrary discrimination, the end of the drug war and the legalization of soft drugs, the curtailment of content regulation in the media (defiance of content guidelines in video games and music being perhaps the first political act of someone roughly my age), the belief in the inherent worth of classical liberal values, and the willingness to defend them by force against real external threats—are thus analytically connected to each other as expressions of the principle of liberty-maximization...

...George W. Bush's Republicanism, which offers a worst-of-all-worlds package of intrusive behavioral regulation for the masses and socialism for the wealthy, exists on borrowed time as the new politics evolves and becomes absorbed into the mainstream...

...76 DISSENT / Spring 2005 STUDENT POLITICS What drove the support for Kerry among my peers was not abstract ideology but a set of concrete, particular concerns: over the government's misadministration and misconduct in Iraq, its apparent war on the free expression of material deemed "offensive" to family values, and the Bush campaign's disgustingly cynical attack on gay citizens, to take the three most pertinent examples in no particular order...

...Its alchemy of substantively reactionary politics and an outwardly counter-institutional mode of expression might seem hard to pull off, but keep in mind that the left's moreorless conscious abandonment of the mantle of anti-authoritarianism coincided neatly and unfortunately with the reframing of the right as a populist movement...

...it rejects the kinds of arguments and the ways of asking questions that predominate in the traditional debate...

...The optimal course for the Democrats and for the left more broadly is impossible to divine, except that it must certainly begin with taking the new politics seriously...

...If I am correct that my generation is not profoundly apathetic, this will amount, in effect, to a rightward reorientation...

...The reason that the project of the current campus left is all but certainly doomed is that the left doesn't recognize that DISSENT / Spring 2005 77 STUDENT POLITICS anything is wrong...

...Most of that day remains a melancholy blur, but one experience left a vivid impression...

...Attacks like that one, though infrequent, along with findings that a majority of professors in the humanities and social sciences are basically liberal or leftist, form a kernel of truth buried in the grossly overblown conservative complaints about liberal and leftist bias on elite college campuses...

...And that was a failure common to every pro-Democratic constituency...

...The populist repackaging of the Republican Party was the work of a small, exceedingly well-organized conservative bloc that seized the argumentative ground that the left had conceded by virtue of its Pyrrhic victories in the fights over political correctness...

...There are consensus positions of people, say, under twenty-five, that are barely noticed or reflected in the competing programs of the governing class...

...Hence, the gayrights movement does not focus on economic injustice...

...and a third, nonaligned faction, which is the largest and the only one, it seems to me, upon which to base any predictions about the future politics of my generation...

...pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world's coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers...

...Many of us were emotionally invested in the outcome of the campaign in a way that we had been for no other cause in our lives...

...The fewer the number of students willing to attend meetings or protests, the more grim-faced and self-important the activists become...

...Much of the rest of the country had not...

...Lessons This alternate politics is in dispute with more than the positions of the mainstream left and right...

...At that moment, I wanted to be a Republican, so that I could feel at an instinctual level the inappropriateness of this response—to devote a literature class to denouncing a legitimate political cause that roughly half the country believed in...

...DANIEL KOFFLER is a junior at Yale, a frequent columnist for the Yale Daily News, and a former Dissent intern...

...From that point on, it was only a matter of time before the left lost the imaginative empathy of the largest number of students...

...the activist right...

...This stunt was recognized by virtually everyone who learned of it as a malicious witch hunt, but whereas the power of campus activists was once something to fear, it had by then become something to laugh at...

...The fact that recognition of gay civil marriage and of the right to serve in the military—bourgeois rights if there ever were any—are by far the most urgent concerns of this new politics ought to provide some insight into its nature...

...No amount of sly framing, pretensions to rebelliousness, or slick presentation, can paper over the fact that its ideology is anathema to the vast majority of students, and not merely to the vocal left...

...Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon ON THE MORNING of November 3, 2004, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, looked like a town in mourning...

...The New Politics Among the things about which young people tend to agree, none is more significant to the future of American politics than the almost total acceptance of gay social equality and the imperative to allow for gay civil equality...

...To take a concrete example of left activism collapsing into self-parody: last year, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Harold Bloom's alleged sexual harassment of Naomi Wolf when she was a student, a current Yale student sent an e-mail to many of Bloom's current and past female students asking them to come forward with further allegations of sexual harassment against Bloom...

...Thus, whereas the student left today consists of fractured interest groups—all that connects, say, a Palestinian advocacy group to anti-sweatshop activism is partial overlap in membership—the student right is tightly unified and linked to nationwide organizations that connect conservative college students at great spatial remove from each other to a surfeit of well-financed organs of the national movement...

...The legal abolition of discrimination against gays is the first and bedrock position of the new student politics...

...The transformation of the left into a mouthpiece for every sort of cultural grievance, whether legitimate or not, had two major consequences: it wedded the left to university administrations, rendering hollow its claims to be an anti-authority movement, and it precipitated the establishment of "speech codes" and similar abominations that constricted free expression...

...Indeed, the definitive feature of the consensus in favor of gay-marriage rights, inclusion of gays in the military, and so on, is that it transcends and dissolves the traditional divide between left and right...

...Obsolete Labels Most widespread and pervasive of all recent political developments among young people and students is the emergence of a broadly defined, neither-left-nor-right libertarianism...

...The silliest prefabricated media analysis of the election was the notion of a "failed" youth vote...

...The end result of such a development would be to make the mass privatization and deregulation of what remains of the welfare state not just possible, but likely...

...In the afternoon, I attended a section for a literature course...

...Still, I would argue that there are three distinct groupings in student politics: the activist left...

...The effect on the right may be salutary, but this result would be poisonous for the best ideals of the traditional left and disastrous for the political culture of the nation as a whole...

...The right, of course, conducts witch hunts of its own, and though the substance of its complaints is usually laughable, too, the fact that we are unable to laugh— the fact that the right is capable of destroying careers—testifies to the right's organizational strengths, which extend beyond the campus...

...It's possible that a candidate who believed in right-libertarian principles of small government, low taxation, and the curtailment of the welfare state could win a majority of the youth vote...

...I will only suggest that the hinge point in the evolution of the campus left to its risible status today is the tight embrace of identity politics and political correctness in the mid-eighties...

...The best way to understand this third group, however, is as a dialectical result of the argument between the better-conceptualized left and right factions and also of various contingent historical developments in academic debates...

...An editorial in the Yale Daily News characterized the morning-after emotions of those of us who had supported Kerry as "disappointment, anger, and anxiety," but those words are far too mild to describe what we were feeling...

...This politics assumes as its foundation the inherent worth of individual rights and strives toward the maximization of individual freedom...

...But more on that in a moment...

...But this disconnect is like a funhousemirrorimage of the conflict between radicalized student bodies and politically retrograde administrations decades ago...

...By contrast, the student right has positioned itself as a representative of insurgency and rebellion...

...Under certain circumstances, the conservatism of the Cato Institute could incorporate the motivations and ideals of the new politics, in which case such politics will be reified as a libertarianism more in line with the way that term is popularly understood...

...or if they refuse to take seriously the threats to both security and liberty posed by fundamentalist terror, then they will succeed only in driving the new politics into the arms of the right...

...And rather than make the effort to mobilize youth voters by speaking to issues they might actually care about, the current political leaders are content to employ inarticulate pop stars to ask us to vote (without giving any compelling reason for doing so) or, even more insulting, to lure young people to the polls through "edgy" graphic-design campaigns...

...If the student left's embrace of political correctness marked the end of its dominance in student politics (though no one noticed it at the time), it is likely that the student right's apologetics for George W. Bush— and most important, for the president's endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment— will turn out to have been the decisive factor in precluding a reorientation of student political culture toward the right...

...but I suspect that part of the motivation behind them is precisely their failure, because their real purpose is to assuage the conviction of older voters in both parties that, despite good intentions and hard work, young people have once again left their civic duties unfulfilled...

...development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations...

...Of course, student politics is neither monolithic nor homogeneous, and there are significant portions of the student body at Yale and across the country that have little in common with what I have called "us" in the political culture of the campus...

...It straddles classes, extending even to a faction of the Republican Party, the "Log Cabin" group that withheld support for George W. Bush's reelection...