On Campus protests, Kent State, and Realism about US Policy in Gaza.
On May 4, 1970, 4 college kids, all too young to drink or vote — the 26th Amendment was not yet law, were gunned down at Kent State University.1
What’s lost in the story is the fact that 9 others were injured, National Guard units were seen as tools of repression, and the fact that opposition to the Vietnam War was shifting away from just a bunch of hippies and radicals.
You see, Kent State was a school filled mostly with white middle class kids. It was not a free or almost free university. Tuition, room, and board were over $1300.
Joining the National Guard was a great way to fufill one’s selective service requirement without going to Vietnam or being called a draft dodger. Just ask Dan Quayle2 or George W. Bush.3
The Kent State shootings had been preceeded by 4 days of campus unrest and protests. It wasn’t the first time a National Guard unit had been ordered to quell social unrest. Guard units had backed up police in stomping down Civil Rights protests for more than than a decade at that point.
In the end, the Ohio National Guard expended 67 bullets in less than 15 seconds into a crowd of 300 college kids. Four killed. Nine injured. An the epitaph for the Vietnam War was written by Neil Young.4
Facebook is filled with memes about the hundreds of colleges having protests and asking if it is organized and coordinated. I have been a Leftist for a long time. If we were organized, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump would have ever gotten into the White House.
The Vietnam War was protested by lots of hippies and radicals in the late 1960s. And only lottery young men cared about by 1970 was the draft lottery. As the means of avoiding the draft narrowed, opposition to the War, as it was called, widened. Kent State was a moment of political realism about the popularity of U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia.
People are protesting what’s going on in Gaza, because the U.S. is stuck with three realities: there is no official plan or support for any kind of Palestinian Autonomy, Benjamin Netanyahu is enormously unpopular in Israel5 and the United States6, and that messaging over what Hamas is is unfortunately muddled.
The idealism of students aside, realists on the Left must message a rejection of the pragmatism that seems to be at the center of U.S. Policy coupled with an answer to the nihilism on the Right.
One good way to do that is to make is clear that the U.S. is in a long term war with terrorist groups, particularly Hamas — they are pure evil, that what caused the war with Hamas is a failure of Israeli intelligence, and that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is politically responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
While eradicating Hamas militarily would seem to be a viable policy objective, the problem is that politically finding a political voice for Palestinians without connections to terrorist groups or sponsor states is far more critical. The absence of a Palestinian to stand up to Hamas and their backers is what is muddling the messaging in Gaza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
In 1988, presidential candidate VP George H.W. Bush’s running mate Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana was questioned relentlessly on whether his family had pulled strings to get him into the National Guard.
The questions of how President George W Bush got into Texas AirNational and whether he fufilled his service requirements consumed too much of the Political Left’s time and energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_(Crosby,_Stills,_Nash_%26_Young_song)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-is-unpopular-at-home-but-not-for-the-reasons-us-lawmakers-are-turning-on-him/#:~:text=And%20just%20because%20Israelis%20back,coalition%20would%20be%20soundly%20defeated.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/25/a-growing-share-of-americans-have-little-or-no-confidence-in-netanyahu/