Protests of the Elites
They doth project too much.
In Rock ‘N’ Roll (2006), Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard contrasts Les Soixant-Huitards (the 1968’ers) of Cambridge University with the liberal reformers of the Prague Spring of 1968. The liberal program of the spring of 1968 gave way, of course, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968.
The play opens (if I recall correctly) with two young men who have been friends since childhood. One of them is very serious about his dissident politics. The other gently criticizes his friend’s dissident politics, suggesting that his friend is really being too dramatic. The old regime may be back in power, but it’s not going to be so bad. Why the fuss?
It turns out, however, that this young fellow ends up getting radicalized himself. He attends a rock concert featuring The Plastic People of the Universe (a real band). But, rock concerts were illegal. (Why?) The authorities show up, and Tom Stoppard’s protagonist ends up getting in a lot of trouble merely for showing up and anticipating a good time. He ends up having to trade in his relatively comfortable place in society with one that is much more constrained. The authorities kick him out of his usual employment and force a local bakery to give him a job notwithstanding the fact that the bakery did not require extra labor. And, so, for the next 20 years he proceeds to do little more than collect enough money to pay the rent. That was life: go to work, collect modest compensation, pay the rent. Wash-rinse-repeat.
Back on the Cambridge University campus, students protest the war in Vietnam. Not that that might not have been worth protesting, but Tom Stoppard gently suggests that the protests amounted more to fashionable posing and posturing than to actual protesting. There might have been some violence. All in good fun!
But, one could imagine that on places like the campus of Columbia University in 1968, protests had more substance. Students had already for some years made a point of burning their “draft cards.” They faced the prospect of military conscription. “Vietnam” was not some abstract thing to many of them.
In the real world, time passes from one cinematic event to the next. From Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980):
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
Kundera started out with high expectations of the formal Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. The “better half” of society, Kundera claimed, celebrated. The old regime was being swept away. A politically-correct regime was taking over.
At some point Kundera himself became disenchanted with the regime. He ended up absconding to France in 1975. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he proceeds to make fun of the politically-correct university types from the perspective of Franz, himself one of denizens of the university:
Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right. Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.
The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.
And, yet, in a flash, “As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power …”
I made some contact with political kitsch in an earlier essay that, in turn, worked off of an essay by playwright David Mamet, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-dead Liberal” (March 11, 2008 in The Village Voice). But, for now let me simply note that this business of kitsch losing its power was the subject of an essay by yet another Czech writer. What I get from Vacav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) is really a game-theoretic point about “common knowledge”: When everyone knows that the system is a joke, and everyone knows that everyone knows that the system is a joke, then the system becomes susceptible to collapse. It becomes just a matter of flipping a coin on any given day. That’s why it’s important for all of us to speak up, shares ideas, agree, agreeably agree-to-disagree. The alternative is to quietly live in lies merely to preserve the modest privilege of collecting modest compensation from the bakery. Wash-rinse-repeat on the road to oblivion.
In To the Castle and Back (2007), then-president Vaclav Havel wrote about what a joke the Neo-Liberal project (or Neo-Con project in the parlance of some) had become:
[A]fter the fall of communism, or rather of the totalitarian system of the communist type, there arose in most countries of the former Soviet bloc a transitional phase that we might provisionally call ‘postcommunism.’ It’s a period of unprecedented and rapid privatization not yet contained within a solid, tried-and-true legal framework and in which, naturally, the former communist nomenklatura, or communist enterprise managers, took a significant part. These people had the appropriate information and contacts …, which meant that they formed the core … of the new entrepreneurial class. They know that democracy means freedom of expression and political association, but they are clever enough to impose limits on these freedoms. The system they favor is, therefore, not truly open but rather has a tendency to close in upon itself. In subtle ways, the economic power links up with political power and the power of the media to create something I once called Mafia-capitalism, though it could equally be called Mafia-democracy.
The protests these days at places like Columbia University seem to largely pit the proponents of The Grand March (with gender flags and Palestinian flags), the self-professedly oppressed elites, against the proponents of Our Democracy™ who, up to this point, have been elevating the self-professedly oppressed to elite status. Will anything come of this, or is it all just theater? Christopher Rufo suggests that there could be some value to sitting back and letting these opposing parties burn each other’s house down.
Meanwhile, in the background, there are some indications that Saudi Arabia is anticipating how to time its move to normalize relations with Israel. Recall that, before 10/7, there had been some indications that the Saudis were moving toward normalization. The mysterious process opened by the Abraham Accords had already encouraged some number of Arab states to recognize Israel. And, just like that the Palestinian matter had disappeared. But, the atrocities of 10/7 seem to have been part of a gambit to disrupt the prospects of further normalization and to restore the focus of attention in the Levant to the Palestinians. Over the short term, that gambit has worked. But, did it merely forestall a bigger process of realignment in the Middle East with an Israeli/Saudi bloc on one side and an Iranian bloc on the other? Will the groans of Gaza yet give way to a quiet resolution of the Palestinian matter—albeit in a way that does not suit the billionaires who comprise the Hamas leadership?
Some footage of then-governor of California Ronald Reagan has been making the rounds. In 1969 he criticized the leadership at the University of California Berkeley for not being more adult in the management of protests on campus. One can even find the footage on TikTok. See it before it’s banned!
