The Rise and Fall of the Campus Left

“And a soul / if it is to know itself / must look / into its own soul:
The stranger and the enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.”
—George Seferis, Mythistorema

The crackup of the liberal-left progressive coalition became undeniable after the 2024 election. But it was a long time coming. Although pro-Palestinian campus protests were at the center of political debate during a pivotal election year, they reflected tensions that predated the dramatic rise in left-wing activism spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Some progressives have blamed former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel for the Democrats’ woes. But the left’s ambivalent response to October 7 only widened rifts that had already begun to show—not just on Israel–Palestine but a host of issues including “wokeness,” gender identity, and the burgeoning of DEI programs on campuses and elsewhere. Clashes over the war in Gaza reflected the fracturing of the left’s broader coalitional project. To quote Ernest Hemingway, the longstanding post-civil-rights consensus over whose interests should prevail in the eyes of the liberal establishment fell apart in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

The model that sustained liberal politics until recently emerged in the late 1960s, as the era’s civil-rights reforms took effect. On college campuses, liberal and radical white student activists increasingly encountered nonwhites from drastically different backgrounds. For liberals, the implicit paternalism that had characterized white involvement in the civil-rights movement gave way to a new model of interracial partnership premised on the demands of an assertive Black minority and the acquiescence of a deferential white majority. The same model would apply as other hitherto marginalized groups sought recognition and representation. Veterans of the student antiwar movement and the civil-rights struggle struck a durable bargain that reshaped higher education and much else in American life.

As Barbara and John Ehrenreich wrote in their landmark study of the New Left, student radicalism institutionalized itself within the liberal professions occupied by the college-educated managerial class:

In their newfound role as adjuncts to the struggle of oppressed groups, left-wing professionals developed a critical self-consciousness about their own position and privileges. The Ehrenreichs describe this “negative class consciousness” as having its origins in white guilt over racial injustice.

New Left radicalism went politically dormant in the seventies and eighties, surviving as an “adversary culture” focused on lifestyle and environmental issues. But liberal institutions, particularly colleges, became vastly more diverse over the same period, as did the country itself. A new liberal consensus emerged around multiculturalism that directed political awareness and expression away from class and toward ethnic and sexual identity. Unpredictable results flowed from this transformation. As Shalom Lappin, emeritus professor of computational linguistics at King’s College London, writes in The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World (2024), liberal multiculturalism in the late 20th century looked almost utopian at first. Multiculturalism eschewed the compromises of assimilation and allowed “distinct cultural groups to retain their collective identities without stigma” and even with pride, offering both a sense of belonging and unfettered communal self-expression that benefitted various minority groups — including, as Lappin notes, Jews.

But something began to change around the turn of the century. There were rumblings of it in the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999 and the antiracist and anti-Zionist agitations in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Spurred on by the war on terror and the second intifada, a revitalized left-wing militancy took shape in opposition to neoliberalism and to the West’s allegedly neo-imperialist ventures in the Middle East after 9/11. As a radicalized view of identity politics supplanted class struggle in wealthy Western countries like the United States, successful minorities like Jews and some Asians came to be associated with racial and economic privilege. They were increasingly asked to demonstrate progressive bona fides by taking a back seat in the competitive system of achievement-oriented meritocracy. They were pressured to adopt the same negative class consciousness the Ehrenreichs had identified among white liberals and leftists in the ‘60s. According to Lappin, for Jews, these ritual demonstrations of political correctness included ever-louder calls to repudiate Israel and to look the other way when pro-Palestinian advocacy descended into rank apologies for terrorism and violence.

The cardinal rule of modern progressivism requires “privileged” groups to forgo self-assertion in the service of solidarity. They are expected to assess claims to moral standing in terms of identity and exhibit deference to members of more marginalized groups. This is key to the coalitional logic of identity politics: “The last shall be first: For many are called but few are chosen.” Jews were eventually accused of breaking this implicit compact by supporting Israel. This was seen as a form of ethnically chauvinist self-assertion at the expense of a more marginalized group, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip — people paradoxically considered more privileged within the left’s grievance hierarchy. Once again, as Lappin remarks, Jewish particularity acquired the character of “a defect to be remedied through assimilation and disappearance” into a broader historical movement.

It was not the first time the left had decided that Jews were out of line. Karl Marx’s contemporary Bruno Bauer opposed Jewish emancipation on the grounds that Judaism was “incompatible with a radically liberal political order,” as Lappin writes. Perhaps inadvertently, Bauer anticipated a Zionist argument for Jewish peoplehood by suggesting that Jewish religious observance was incompatible with secular citizenship in a multiethnic state. Marx’s reply to Bauer in “On The Jewish Question” defended Jewish political emancipation but suggested that history would take care of the problem of particularity by transcending “the exploitative structures of capitalism” that had set Jews apart. As Marx asserted:

The peculiar logic of the argument suggested that in this case the exploited class needed to be liberated from the yoke that they themselves imposed on society as agents of capital. Although himself of Jewish descent, Marx assigned Jews demeaning traits marking their social inferiority from which they might be liberated by an “objective” change in historical circumstances. There was nothing to suggest that Jews were deserving of either individual or collective dignity on their own terms. This represents a longstanding pattern in Western culture that somehow or other has survived to the present despite all efforts at reform.

As the fervor of left-wing politics has grown in recent years, so has its intolerance of dissent and hostility to compromise. Leftists have adopted a Stalinist-inflected deviationist rhetoric about antisemitism: “Any attempt by Jews to make the struggle against antisemitism into a separate problem deserving of the same passion as other progressive causes” is summarily dismissed, Lappin writes. Similarly, Jewish demands for recognition of their historically oppressed status can expect to be met with indifference or hostility. Jewish communal organizations such as Hillel are increasingly labeled as “Zionist” entities, their members made to feel unwelcome and intimidated on campuses and elsewhere. In practice, progressivism requires Jewish capitulation. Lappin observes that diaspora Jews are expected to comply meekly with the demands of anti-Zionists to “disavow Israel” or forgo social acceptance. That such demands put many in an impossible position should be obvious. But unfortunately, that is the point.

To make matters worse, over the last two decades, as Lappin notes, illiberal movements including political Islamism “have become increasingly influential in shaping what passes for progressive activism.” Because parts of the left refuse to universalize formal commitments to pluralism and tolerance in the name of multiculturalism, they — not for the first time — readily make tactical agreements with illiberal forces that appear to be moving history in a desired direction. In The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French political philosopher Raymond Aron argues that the long history of left-wing politics is marked by a tendency to exoticize and revere the self-anointed representatives of the suffering masses, no matter how repellent or extreme their views. During the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamist clerics such as Tariq Ramadan and Yusuf al-Qaradawi played successfully on the naïveté and idealism of Western liberals against the Bush administration’s draconian counterterrorism efforts to drum up sympathy for jihadists. During the same period, the gender theorist Judith Butler urged “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.” More recently, Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah have been lionized and mourned by keffiyeh-clad protesters and campus activists.

To keep doing the same thing while expecting a different result is a familiar definition of insanity; it is also characteristic of what Mitchell Cohen has called “the left that doesn’t learn.” Cohen argues that the tendency to turn a blind eye to transgressions by those perceived as allies is a way of coping with cognitive dissonance. Certainly cognitive dissonance and its affiliated forms of distorted thinking are by no means unique to the left. But the left has its own distinctive legacy on this front, as Cohen argues: “Cognitive dissonance characterizes some feminists like Butler who pretend Hamas is not what it is and do not to see in its rape and murder of Israeli women what these acts are.” It also offers a suggestive explanation for the silence on campuses in the face of the appalling spectacle of the release of Israeli hostages, including coffins containing the bodies of murdered children. Or, in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, the failure of college presidents to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas by name.

Pondering a similar legacy of denial and evasion by leftists faced with the crimes of Stalin, Aron wondered: “Why this preference, in a way a priori, for one side?” What sustains the implacable belief that “this monster all spattered with blood,” as Aron characterized the Communist project, offers the right road to salvation? Aron believed the best explanation lay in the tribal laws of partisanship and identity. Postwar French intellectuals could not abide “not being on the left”; most American intellectuals—particularly faculty on college campuses—cannot bear being labeled “conservative.” Then as now, pressures toward conformity in ideologically homogenous environments shouldn’t be underestimated. The problem is that these environments also lack reliable means of self-correction. A herd of independent minds can decide to plunge together off a cliff when conditions of external pressure and internal groupthink prevail.

The New Antisemitism expands an argument that Lappin initially made two decades ago in the left-wing journal Dissent. In “How Class Disappeared from Western Politics,” Lappin suggested that a strategic alliance had formed between two political movements that were otherwise profoundly at odds. “Much of what remains of the radical left,” Lappin wrote, “has aligned itself with extreme Islamic political movements” because of a peculiar interpretation of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism that places opposition to the United States and Israel at the center of the struggle for global justice. This sentiment has taken root on college campuses, much as support for Marxist revolutionaries and homegrown left-wing militants did in the ‘60s. Ideological and stylistic similarities confirm their affinity. The New Left pioneered the theoretical move “from a politics of class conflict” to “a global morality play in which the dialectic of progressive and reactionary forces is transposed into a competition between cultures and geopolitical regions.” At the same time, Marxism in the academy “migrated from political science and economics to cultural studies” while taking on the rhetoric of postmodernist and postcolonial criticism. The cultural turn in Marxist theory allowed regressive, antimodernist tendencies to flourish on the left. The struggle for liberation became focused on a Manichean rejection of the West and its ways, as the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon suggested it would.

During last year’s wave of protests, this rejection was on full display. Incidents of verbal and sometimes physical aggression broke out with unsettling frequency, violating campus rules and basic norms of civility while reflecting not just outrage over a faraway war but broader social unrest. Like the campus insurrections of the ‘60s they clearly echoed, the pro-Palestine demonstrations exuded an aura of unassailable self-righteousness with revolutionary underpinnings. Student groups at Harvard, for example, issued a statement on the day of the October 7 attacks that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement continued:

Perceptive readers might have noticed similarities to the rhetoric of Black nationalist militants of an earlier generation, such as the poet and activist Amiri Baraka, who wrote:

Both statements intimate that injustice begets injustice and that resistance justifies violence. Indeed both go further, claiming that counterviolence is called for in response to preexisting oppression; its victims are assigned responsibility for their fate. Both see the disorder of “decolonizing violence” as a virtuous reordering of relations, in terms borrowed from Fanon. In focusing on the now-commonplace comparison of Palestinians to Black Americans suffering racial discrimination, or indigenous South Africans under apartheid, the one-sided characterization of Israel’s responsibility starts to make sense. However, facts that belie the narrative — such the extensive access of Hamas and other Palestinian militants to money and weapons, or their eliminationist ideology — must be shunted aside.

Reputation laundering is a function of the cult of fashionable militancy whereby elites and radicals gain by mutual association what the writer Tom Wolfe called, in 1970, “radical chic.” The coinage first appeared in a famous article in New York Magazine (later republished as a book) in which Wolfe provides a caustic account of the bizarre comity between Manhattan socialites and Black radicals. It offers an enduring analysis of the dynamics of partnerships between radicals and elites. Wolfe saw the patronizing interest in the Panthers and other dissident groups shown by wealthy celebrities and socialites as a way for the elites to enhance their status by associating themselves vicariously with glamorous militants who were seen as advancing social justice. Radical chic became a byword for elites seeking to garner unearned political and moral prestige.

But the benefits flowed both ways. Wolfe’s essay centers on a fund raiser for the Black Panthers at the Park Avenue duplex of the celebrated composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, focusing on the incongruities of class, race, and social manners among the attendees, and the fallout of a publicity misfire no one anticipated. (Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, were outraged by a New York Times op-ed that ran in response to a society-pages column by Charlotte Curtis on the event. The editorial lambasted the soirée as a self-indulgent exercise in “elegant slumming” that “mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.” by platforming his militant adversaries.) If the Bernsteins’ circle of artists, intellectuals, and financiers saw the Panthers as “the legitimate vanguard of the Black struggle for liberation” because of their violent reputation and demeanor, the Panthers also understood their utility to the jetsetters. They gave elites street appeal and credibility. Organized militants often bankroll their activities by acting as intermediaries for insecure elites. If college students chant “We are Hamas,” then perhaps suffering Palestinians in Gaza will reciprocate by signaling their gratitude. New life can be breathed into the alliance between intellectuals and the proletariat on which the far left depends.

Radical chic, however, is not a marker of the strength of a political partnership but a sign of its fragility. In January 1969, when the infamous soiree at the Bernsteins occurred, both white liberals and Black radicals felt menaced in different ways by the rising backlash represented by two ascendant right-wing politicians: president-elect Richard Nixon and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The 1968 election had left the Democratic Party in tatters; the student protest movement had begun to fracture along racial lines; campus activism would spiral out into the terrorism of the Weathermen and the state repression of the Kent State shootings. The bonds holding together the liberal-left coalition of the civil-rights era were noticeably fraying. It would take years to repair them. Not until 1977 would Democrats win back control of government.

The term radical chic readily suggests itself in reference to the keffiyeh-clad throngs of protesters who flooded streets and campuses last year. Interestingly, the widely displayed Palestinian headscarf has its own role in the etiology of radical chic. Its iconic status dates back to 1969, when Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was photographed wearing a keffiyeh while holding a Kalashnikov during the hijacking of a TWA airliner. Yasser Arafat, who became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization that same year, was indelibly associated with the keffiyeh in the public eye for decades. It was simultaneously embraced as an haute-couture accessory in the West and seemingly never went out of style. The keffiyeh is now far more than a symbol of Palestinian resistance. It signals a hazier claim to countercultural aspirations and rejection of conventional social norms. Its mass popularity, however, indicates a deeper subversion of traditional expectations among Western youth, an affective realignment of solidarity away from their own societies and toward some of their fiercest opponents.

As before, radical chic represents a rewiring of political allegiances that will persist as long as it remains exempt from serious scrutiny. Exposure, as Wolfe pointed out, tends to undermine it. Pro-Palestinian campus activists have made one unforced error after another in praising terrorists as martyrs and liberators while sometimes veering into antisemitic harassment. As Cohen has pointed out, it was always possible to advocate for the rights and wellbeing of Palestinians without making excuses for murderers. But for the most part, that is not what has been happening on campuses. The Trump administration is now poised to take full advantage of that moral blunder. Two weeks ago the U.S. Department of Education unveiled plans to suspend $400 million in federal funds to Columbia, ratcheting up pressure on colleges that according to an earlier press release saw an “explosion of antisemitism … following the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians.” Even if the funding cuts at Columbia are rolled back, they are likely only a first step. The administration has announced investigations at dozens of other campuses. Plenty of damage has already been done, with more likely to follow.

In searching for alternatives to the present order, the far left and the far right show deep affinities in espousing illiberalism, condoning violence, and holding institutions hostage to their goals. The left also increasingly shares with the right a dismal, reactionary view of world affairs and human nature as “impervious to reason and governable only through brutal acts of will,” in the words of the journalist and author Katherine Stewart. Most troubling of all, perhaps, is the perverse collaboration of these erstwhile antagonists in rekindling the embers of antisemitism. As Lappin concludes, the upsurge in antisemitism flows from a well of anti-establishment grievance that “crosses ideological boundaries” and fractures old alliances. If Jews are once again scapegoats in a rudderless world, then the left — whose stated purpose is the pursuit of human equality and dignity — is unravelling. A left that is distinguishable from the right in style but not substance is no left at all.