Is It Protest or Is It LARP?

You might be interesting in this piece at UnHerd by Kat Rosenfield:

Between the chanting, the dancing, and the… well, whatever this is, it’s hard to blame the kids for wanting to join what is, for all intents and purposes, a party. It’s also hard to blame them for being somewhat bewildered when the party ends with their own university calling the cops, who in turn force them to disperse with a fire hose. It’s not just the brutality; it feels like a breach of contract. As writer and academic Tyler Austin Harper has noted, Columbia and others like it explicitly highlight their histories as incubators of political activism with the express purpose of attracting a particular type of young person, the kind for whom protesting and partying seem like one and the same thing.

I suspect that this is why these events have the feeling of performance, or even parody: a photogenic, vibes-based facsimile of radical activism instead of the thing itself. It’s not just that their ostensible goal of “divestment” — in this case, from ETFs that include shares in businesses with ties to Israel — is a categorical impossibility; a number of the campus demonstrators will openly admit that they neither know nor care what specific policies they’re demonstrating against. What matters is, they’re part of something, a tradition of campus activism that dates back a hundred years. For the students who are drawn to Columbia’s “Social Justice university” branding, protesting is less about results than participation, a sort of institutionally-sanctioned Larp, like one of those interactive team-building exercises where you get to solve a murder, or escape from prison — or, in this case, hunt a witch.

I wonder if it would surprise her that that is what the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s were like as well. Speaking as someone who was there and lived a half block from one of the universities most notable for the protests, right next door to one of major organizers, there were precious few protesters who were actually opposed to the war. There were lots who were opposed to the draft or, in other words, they were motivated by self-interest. And for others it was just something to do. I can’t speak for every protester at every demonstration at every university but that’s what I saw at my alma mater.