There will be no student movement this time, and it’s our own fault

We have a vengeful, semi-literate dipshit as president, currently thrashing around the executive branch like a manatee in a gift shop. Through him, the Musks and Millers and Vances act out their patent-leather fantasies on the vulnerable: immigrants, women, anyone “diverse” or “included.” It is grotesque and awful, and reminds me why I’ve never been a fan of nonviolent resistance.

But we had years of warning, then months where the shade was approaching, implacably, and now we’ve had a month of hyper-accelerated experience. You cannot mistake what’s happening, and it doesn’t matter now what you call it. (“Is it fascism?” is as unproductive at the moment as “Is it genocide?” Grab a bucket, the water is rising.) So what is anyone on the left going to do about it? More importantly, who is going to do something about it, and how?

Put aside for now the sclerotic response of the older generation of Democratic politicians and the paralysis of Gen-X progressives, neither of whom have demonstrated that they even understand the scope of the situation, much less that they have any action plan, or even a mitigation strategy. 

It is difficult to feign astonishment that norm-addicted careerists are presently flat-footed. Historically, liberal democracies stand naked in a knife fight anytime the going gets really tough. This is especially true of the political centrists and technocrats, whose instincts can only produce compromise or surrender anyway, in the best of circumstances.

But in generations past, the left could always find a flicker — one that could be nurtured into a flame — among the students. Sproul Plaza in Berkeley; the lunch counter in Birmingham; ripping up the paving stones in 1968; Seattle; Zucotti Park; Black Lives Matter (BLM). It’s these kids, who are always supposed to be alright, the ones who have always thrown their bodies onto the gears of the machine, upon whom I want to focus here. 

Let’s say you’re a politically aware, college-age progressive kid right now, and you are striving to understand what’s going on and how you might be able to participate and express yourself. 

First of all, congratulations. Just on the strength of that description you’ve already overcome a system that has literally no interest in you becoming well-read, or free-thinking, or anything that may pose a challenge to your classmates’ employment prospects, or knowing or investigating the history of popular protest in this country. The clients of a university in 2025 are not you or your parents; they are its endowment donors and the corporations for whose benefit you are being groomed. 

Have your professors made this current world intelligible? Have they provided a curriculum that shines light in dark places of politics and culture? Is your school a site of real interchange about how societies reproduce or change, or does it feel more like a mere conveyor of constant corporate downloads?

But let’s say you have, in fact, enjoyed the exhausted adjunct professor’s class on art and society, or the last-ever African-American studies symposium, right before the program is abolished and something more suitably patriotic takes its place in the catalog. Maybe you took that hippie-with-tenure’s seminar on the ’60s, and learned about Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. 

Let’s say you looked around now and said to yourself and your friends, let’s just see, let’s see what we can do here. Let’s toss a note over the wall, let’s shout down into the valley, let’s just see, it’s important.

Well, what have you seen, and what were you forced to endure, over these formative years. Your uncle says he was beaten with a truncheon, fire-hosed and tear-gassed in Seattle; now he works for the county. Your older sister brought readings and meals to the Occupy camp, but she was told it was all pointless and her boss laughed at her, like she was some dummy. Your old babysitter marched at BLM protests, but she still gets pulled over for being Black in a sort of nice car. 

Last year, however, against all that, you stuck your own neck out. You thought that colonial situations were messy and violent, and that you had a right to say that. You thought maybe you had a right to say that proportional responses might not include hospital bombings and strafing of refugee camps, or that even justifiable retaliation had limits. You thought that maybe you could get away with saying that criticism of a state, acting in the world among the family of nations, did not equate to blood libel or essentialist hate. You’d figured these were ideas that may not be shared by everyone, but surely could be voiced in a free society.

You were quite wrong, it turns out. Your face was traced at a protest, your dean was alerted, your job interviews were cancelled and your grad school applications rejected. You were doxxed online. Your friends were suspended or expelled; their campus clubs were delisted. You were called “garbage” by your city’s mayor when the volume of your protest annoyed her.

Now maybe you don’t see the point of hitting the streets and making signs and chanting slogans. Maybe you’ll just wait this one out, even if it seems very important to the people who never supported your own right to a political voice. Maybe you never learned how important and delicate democracy was because no one acted that way when it was your ass in the jackpot.

This is all to say that the left has turned its back on students, by and large. Not just turned its back, it has attacked, maligned and exiled them. It helped create the conditions for a hollowed-out system of higher education, in which only the most remarkable of students would even dream of political engagement, and then it stamped its heel on those same students when issues of world-historical importance stirred them to engage. 

Maybe the left didn’t think it would ever again need the kids, their energy, their natural and bottomless defiance. A significant number of school-age kids today don’t just doubt the efficacy of protest, but voted for and actively support this administration, so maybe they’re thinking they don’t need a left, either.

The universities of the 1960s were somehow able to withstand and absorb the brilliant, witty and sustained student attacks of the era. The brittle institutions of today lash out like frightened, fragile regimes, their presidents resigning under pressure — presidents whom, if they were going to surrender to speech-killing reactionaries, should have at least done so in valiant defense of their students. It is more likely they were pressured to resign because their ability to fundraise had been intolerably compromised.

All of this has now killed off the combative spirit of students we now need so badly. There probably will be no student movement this time. We have made sure there won’t be movements, really, of any kind, but especially not of students in service to some notion of the common good or a shared future. They have learned very well the bad faith with which we operate. 

We have hammered into most kids that a chance to join a consultancy, or some law firm, or getting a real estate license, is much more important, and into the remarkable kids that we’ll kick their teeth out if they try to decide for themselves what a war crime is, or what is or is not moral conduct in the public sphere. 

History walks in ten-league boots, and now it’s coming up the drive. The kids are absolutely not alright, and they’re not coming outside to help, either. They’ll be in their rooms, on their phones, texting their real comrades, thinking that time is on their side, even if it’s not. I’m not certain who can blame them.

Bradley Schrager is a political law attorney in Las Vegas and an occasional contributor to this site.

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