Students are about to head back to campus, and the prospect that wounds over the war in Gaza will reopen looms over universities across the country.
But even after weeks of protest in the spring, many still don’t properly understand that the campus crisis isn’t just about one conflict in the Middle East: It’s an outburst of frustration from a generation disaffected with America and, to some extent, democracy.
The campus demonstrations more or less evaporated as colleges went on summer break. After police interventions and controversial deals between protesters and administrators, it seems the most powerful antidote to the campus crisis was the school bell.
But that calm may prove illusory. Students are returning to campus with the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza grinding on and a potential full-scale war with Iran ticking up by the day. All of this while young voters face down a presidential election where, for the third cycle in a row, “democracy is on the ballot.” The framing may be accurate, but I recognize that it must be exhausting to hear over and over.
The bespoke reality through which young people consume information over social media is accelerant on an already flammable political situation. TikTok clips, Instagram infographics, and 280-character tweets demand immediate, emotional responses without capturing nuance. And yet, this is how a majority of young Americans process current events.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when protesters spring back into action with tents, signs, and chants within a few weeks. The very real suffering in Gaza was the obvious trigger for the protests, but outcry over this far-away conflict has given expression to grievances over far more fundamental problems in American politics.
It’s About America, Too
Students today are growing up with an especially unhealthy frame of reference for governance, politics, and America’s legitimacy in the world.
From the perspective of the protesters, Israel is an illegitimate settler society, but it’s just one rotten branch of the American imperialist tree: “Decolonization from Turtle Island [an indigenous name for America] to Palestine” was a common protest appeal. “Free Palestine” is often accompanied with puzzling calls to “free Hawaii,” even though Floridians are more likely to secede than residents of the Aloha state.
The takeaway is that America is irredeemably bad.
In its stead, some of the more vocal protesters have placed their faith in authoritarians and their terrorist proxies. It’s one thing to protest Israeli and American policies on Gaza. It’s quite another to praise the “resistance” of Hamas, the Iran-backed terrorist organization that carried out the October 7 massacre and runs Gaza as an autocratic militarized fiefdom, or the Houthis, who routinely assault civilian cargo vessels and whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, curse the Jews and victory to Islam.”
A Poor Political Upbringing
Back in April, I visited Columbia to see the student demonstrations for myself. I marveled at the protesters’ disaffection. Now, I think I’m beginning to understand it.
Place yourself in the shoes of a nineteen year-old rising sophomore. You were born around 2005. The first presidential election you remember clearly was 2016—hardly a shining example of constructive political debate. That was also the last and only example of a peaceful transfer of power you can recall in your politically conscious life. The January 6th insurrection is as much the norm for you as Barack Obama’s cordial handover of the White House keys to Donald Trump.
The Trump presidency concluded with a pandemic that left many in this generation socially isolated for a significant chunk of their high school years. However necessary, COVID-era precautions had a side-effect of leaving young Americans deeply sad, well after states lifted their lockdowns.
Joe Biden replaced Donald Trump in 2021. From where I sit, Biden has been a good president, but I can also understand why our oldest chief executive was an uninspiring standard-bearer for some of the youngest voters—only 20 percent of whom favored Biden during the 2020 Democratic primary. Democrats were right to raise the alarm about Trump as a would-be authoritarian menace, but—until their belated replacement of Biden in July—they looked terribly unserious in confronting that threat as they ran an octogenarian candidate who struggled to actually campaign.
Meanwhile, as the Gaza war continued, Biden seemed unable to break out of his own generational frame of reference, repeating his favorite stories of Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin as he dealt with Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir. His callbacks to the Israel of the 1970s only reinforced the image of Biden as unresponsive to youth concerns, an anachronistic holdover from a previous generation—not only on this issue, but as a broad assessment of the president’s character.
Democracy Isn’t a Priority
For most of these students’ political lives, American politics has been an incubator for nihilism and apathy towards democratic institutions.
And with such a broken domestic political environment, America’s standing abroad becomes all the more suspect. What do we have to contribute to the world when we can’t facilitate a proper presidential election? Being too old is not the same as being too corrupt and too authoritarian, but it’s not exactly a compelling alternative either. At least the terrorists and dictators appear energetic by comparison.
This is not an endorsement of what we see on campus, but a course-correction in our threat assessment. People turn to despots and demagogues when they feel like their institutions don’t work and their leaders don’t represent them. It is easy for students to be captured by ideological extremism on the Left (which, in turn, mobilizes the Right) when young people feel things are generally bad and that there is nothing to believe in.
A March Harvard Institute of Politics poll had Gaza tied with the question of democracy at the bottom of a list of priorities for young voters—just two percent ranked either issue as their top concern. Lost in the discussion over Israel and Palestine at the front of the protests is the deeper warning that America is raising a generation for whom our open society and democratic institutions simply aren’t that important.
Evan Gottesman is chief of staff at the Renew Democracy Initiative.
