In today's NYT newletter, David Leonhardt shares an insightful angle on the differences between progressives and conservatives. I'm not exactly sure how to share just that article, but I feel it's so helpful, and important, that I'm going to paste it below (yellow highlights are mine):
Dueling
priorities
Arnold Kling, an
economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the
core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the
world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to
help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between
civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect
civilization.
Like many frameworks,
Kling’s is a simplification, and it’s easy to find exceptions. But his book has
been influential because the framework often sheds light on political
arguments.
The debate over
pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and other universities has become an
example. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the
situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question
for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire
of students to denounce oppression.
In today’s newsletter,
I’ll lay out the cases of the dueling sides.
Confronting
injustice
For the
student protesters, the injustice in Gaza is so horrific that it takes
precedence over almost anything else.
The
death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is more than 30,000, the Gaza Ministry of
Health reports. Entire neighborhoods are rubble. Israel has slowed the entry of
basic supplies into Gaza, and many families are hungry. (My colleagues Vivian
Yee and Bilal Shbair profiled two families trying to find their
children enough to eat.)
The
protesters view this suffering as an atrocity that demands action, much as Jim
Crow laws, the Vietnam War and South African apartheid did for earlier students.
In a statement yesterday, a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia cited as
inspiration the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators who were killed at Kent State
University in 1970.
If
classes must be canceled and graduation ceremonies can’t happen, all the
better, the students say. The disruptions will force the world to confront what
the protesters describe as a genocide. “Big picture, genocide is happening, and
this is where we stand,” one Columbia graduate student told the publication Hell Gate.
Many
protesters specifically call for their universities to divest from companies
that do business in Israel or help produce military equipment.
Some
students have framed the debate as being about free speech, and free-speech
principles do play a role. But I don’t think they are as central as Kling’s
frame. Both sides, after all, have tried to restrict speech. Supporters of
Israel have doxxed pro-Palestinian students and tried to penalize slogans like
“From the river to the sea.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have ripped away
Israeli and U.S. flags and tried to prevent pro-Israel students from speaking.
The
protesters’ abiding principle is not freedom of speech. It is justice for the
oppressed.
Preventing
chaos
For the
protesters’ critics, the breakdown of order is the central problem — because a
community that descends into chaos can’t function.
Protesters
have frequently violated colleges’ rules. They have erected tents in public
places and overwhelmed those areas. Columbia has switched to hybrid classes
because of the turmoil.
Even
worse, some protests have involved harassment and violence. The University of
Michigan had to cut short an honors ceremony for students. At Vanderbilt, more
than 20 protesters stormed the president’s office, injuring a security guard
and shattering a window. At Columbia, videos have
shown protesters threatening Jewish students with antisemitic vitriol,
including a sign talking about Hamas’s “next targets.”
If
universities do not enforce their own rules against such behavior, the rules
have no meaning, administrators fear. Other protesters, seeing their own causes
as existential, could likewise halt normal life. Perhaps they would be climate
activists or students outraged by China’s oppression of Uighurs — or even
demonstrators with right-wing views unpopular on American campuses. If
anti-abortion protesters were to take over a quad for days, would university
administrators ignore their own campus rules?
Jason
Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has compared the
protesters’ tactics to those of the white residents of Arkansas who tried to
use physical intimidation to prevent the enforcement of a law they didn’t like:
school desegregation. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proclaiming that
“disorderly mobs” could not triumph, Riley noted.
College
administrators are not making such analogies. Many express sympathy for the
protesters’ concerns. But some insist that society can’t function if people
violate rules without consequence. “We cannot have one group dictate terms and
attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point
of view,” Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, wrote to the campus this week.
What’s
next?
I recognize that not
everybody will accept Kling’s framework for this debate. Pro-Palestinian
students will say that Israel is the true source of disorder, while pro-Israel
students will say that Hamas is the true oppressor.
Still, I think the Kling
dichotomy captures the dilemma that university leaders face. The protests
continue, and graduation season is approaching. Those leaders will have to make
difficult decisions about what values to prioritize.
I'm not sure why that brought such clarity for me, but it did. Of course, there is the monkey-wrench of how the far-right faction of conservatives (and maybe the far-left of progressives, but I don't honestly see that) seem intent on creating their own sort of chaos to serve their very narrow agenda, but still, I imagine both, and, either/or all fit to some degree within what they see as the "greater good." At least I'd like to think so...
Innaresting stuff as we try to navigate through this contentious world together, eh?
