by Robby Soave
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For my grandmothers, Dolores and Martha
— PROLOGUE —
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
This is a roundup
This is a low-flying panic attack
—Radiohead, “Burn the Witch”
On November 4, 2008, I was a college junior working as an assistant editor in the offices of the Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s primary student newspaper, when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. As a libertarian who opposed big government and the Iraq War with equal fervor, I hadn’t felt positively about Obama or his rival, John McCain, and was thus disinterested in the outcome.
But at UM, I was almost completely alone on that front: Obama’s landslide victory provoked campus-wide celebration. An impromptu band formed on the Diag, the campus’s main public square, and played the national anthem. Hundreds cheered “Yes we did!” and “Go-bama!” Students flooded the streets of Ann Arbor—including many of my colleagues at the left-leaning newspaper.
One student, a young woman, summed up the general sentiments of a campus that felt like its own political activism—rallies, voter registration drives, campaign grunt work—played at least a small role in Obama’s victory. She told a Daily reporter, “I feel this is the greatest moment of our lives.”1
Eight years later, America elected Donald Trump to be its next president. No one danced or sang at Michigan, though many shed tears.
The night of the election, as Trump’s victory became evident, the energy drained from the Daily’s typically convivial newsroom. The mood changed “from tipsy to holy shit,” according to Emma Kinsey, a senior news editor and later editor in chief of the Michigan Daily. Literally and metaphorically sobered by the results, the editors dispatched reporters to cover the student reaction on campus. But the only thing to write about was everyone’s overwhelming sadness.
“Everyone was just upset,” Kinsey told me. “My roommates were crying. Some classes the next day were canceled. Then campus Republicans were pissed that classes were canceled, which is valid. It was a weird time.
“That night there was some sort of mourning,” Kinsey continued. “Then there were a bunch of protests the next day. After that, there were many protests across campus—constantly, it felt like.”
A similar thing took place at other campuses. A day after Trump won the presidency, left-leaning professors at such lofty institutions as Columbia and Yale postponed midterms, or made them optional, in order to give students time to heal.2 (Yale, notably, did not even cancel classes on September 11, 2001.)3 The Cornell Daily Sun—the student publication of Cornell University—invited members of the community to attend a public “cry-in.” The University of Michigan provided its students with coloring books, Play-Doh, and Legos, while the University of Pennsylvania made small animals available for cuddling.
“There were actual cats and a puppy there,” Penn student Daniel Tancredi told the College Fix. “The event as a whole seemed to be an escape from the reality of the election results.”4
The weekend after the election, Alex, a student at Reed College who identifies as bipolar, black, and queer, posted a message on Facebook asking students to email the administration and demand Monday off because “students of color and other marginalized students need a day to rest … classes should be cancelled tomorrow and also there should be no work due tomorrow.”
Trump’s victory came as a shock to many Americans on the left, on the right, and in the middle of the political spectrum—including the author of this book, whose own politics don’t fit neatly in any one spot. But for young progressive activists, the election wasn’t just a surprise or a disappointment: it was a declaration of war, an act of outright violence, a hate crime.
“It really is their 9/11,” said Laila, a twenty-six-year-old Muslim woman and political activist, recalling the emotional impact of the election on Generation Z—an age cohort whose members were for the most part born after the events of September 11, 2001. “Not that I’m attempting in any way to equate the loss of so many precious lives to an individual that was elected to office,” she added.
Still, the comparison is illustrative. According to leftist activist members of the millennial generation (birth dates 1980–2000) and Gen Z (birth dates post–2000), the election of Trump was psychologically scarring on an order of magnitude resembling the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, countless students at some of the most elite college campuses in the country complained that they were suffering from a kind of self-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It was traumatizing,” Juniper, a nineteen-year-old who transitioned from male to female and attends the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “Every time I realized that someone I knew voted for Trump, it was sort of a personal attack, or at least it felt that way.”
Yet it would be a mistake to think young progressives did nothing but sit around and cry about Trump. Far from it. Leftist activism, on college campuses and elsewhere, is now enjoying a considerable resurgence. This resurgence began at least some years before Trump captured the White House, and it can trace its roots to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, which started as a popular demonstration against economic inequality before degenerating into a series of smaller, zanier protests. (Echoes of the Bush-era Iraq War protest movement are present as well, though Trump’s confused, occasionally constrained foreign policy may have prevented the anti-war movement—which prematurely dissolved around the time Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize—from properly reconstituting itself.)
For a variety of reasons, including the growing power of social media, revised federal guidelines from the Education Department that reward squeaky wheels, and sheer administrative capitulation, activists enjoy considerably more power on college campuses in the 2010s than they did in the 2000s. College is where their influence is concentrated, but they would like to control the conversation everywhere else as well. In this regard, the election of Trump was merely an intensifier: voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan may have kicked the hornet’s nest, but the hive was already in motion.
In the political realm, the most energized contingent of the Democratic Party is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is pushing the party to move toward Bernie Sanders—and beyond—on a variety of issues: Medicare for all, free college tuition, and a federal jobs guarantee, among others. Today’s young people grew up well after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and thus they never came to view socialism as an existential threat. Socialism is all the good stuff they would like the government to provide: universal health care, a high minimum wage, and so on. For Democratic Socialists, getting rid of Trump isn’t going nearly far enough, since Trump is just a symptom of the disease that’s ailing America—capitalism.
“If Trump got impeached tomorrow, people’s lives would improve, but we’d still have to work, we’d still have capitalism, we’d
still have imperialism,” Alex Pellitteri, an eighteen-year-old college freshman and cochair of New York City’s Young Democratic Socialists, told me in an interview.
Sympathetic readers likely see the activism of millennials and Gen Z—hereafter referred to as “Zillennials” when discussed collectively—as merely a continuation of the lofty, noble activism of previous generations. Radical activists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s fought for racial equality, an end to the morally unconscionable Vietnam War, economic protections for the most vulnerable citizens, the rights of women, and the dignity of LGBT people. If Trump is as noxious as he seems—an obstacle to the kind of society that moderate and progressive people want to build—isn’t he worth fighting with the same fervor, the same youthful passion?
Unfortunately for everyone who would like to see Trump humbled on some front, the Zillennial left suffers from several serious defects that make it fundamentally unlike the fondly remembered activist movements of decades past. In fact, these defects frequently lead Zillennial activists to embrace tactics that are at best counterproductive and often completely at odds with the successful strategies employed by their radical forebears. Some of these defects were apparent before Trump’s election, but over the past two years, they have only become more glaring.
The purpose of this book is to explore these defects and chronicle the various ways in which they serve to undermine the progressive cause. I will explain how and why the various contingents of the new radical left are at odds with older activists, with moderate and liberal Americans who might otherwise support them, and even with themselves. I will delve into their tactics and goals, outline the structures of their organizations, and provide insight into where their leaders come from and what they think. Consider this a psychological profile of the Zillennial activist, an origin story for the selfie generation’s social change agents: antifa, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo feminists, the Parkland kids, and many others.
In order to construct such a profile, I’ve interviewed, read, listened to, and engaged with hundreds of politically engaged millennials and Gen Zers from around the country over the last few years. I’ve visited campuses all over the country, attended protests, and even snuck into meetings. Whenever possible, I’ve asked the activists to explain themselves, and have used their own words to describe their views.
Assisting me in this effort is the fact that I was twenty-nine years old at the time this book was written. My 1988 birth date places me smack-dab in the middle of the millennial cohort. I speak the language (“person of color” instead of “African American”), know the culture (those BuzzFeed “You Might Be a Millennial if You Loved This TV Show/Band/Movie” quizzes were pretty much modeled after my exact tastes), and look the part (I wear sandals, skinny jeans, and a T-shirt to the office on most days).
My own libertarian views put me in the unlikely but usefully neutral position of being neither entirely hostile nor entirely friendly toward the activist movements I researched. We libertarians are for economic and social freedom, which makes me sympathetic to many of the left’s goals with respect to the latter: civil rights, tolerance, peace. Indeed, one of the reasons I am so concerned about their tactics backfiring is that I would occasionally like them to succeed.
Frustratingly, my conversations with young activists left me concerned that they will struggle to translate their feelings into any sort of cohesive movement that wins undecided Americans to its cause. That’s because they frequently seem almost hysterically opposed to building bridges with potential allies, preferring to settle scores with people who are for the most part already on their side. The college-aged activist of modern times is radically exclusionary and often views the principles of open debate with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Indeed, many of the young people interviewed for this book thought speech that offends them should be illegal, or was already illegal.
Reflexive opposition to speech is perhaps the most noticeable quirk of the new left, misunderstood though it is. While it’s true that small numbers of campus radicals have always desired to shut down speakers with whom they disagree, student activists have grown more militantly opposed to free speech, and more successful at no-platforming (British slang for censoring) their critics—whether these critics are outside speakers, or even their own professors. The activists’ rejection of broad First Amendment norms—norms that are central to the American experiment in participatory democracy—generally takes one of two forms.
Some activists simply reject the notion that people who do not share their views should be given rights at all; these activists are following in the intellectual tradition of a certain strain of Marxism, best articulated by the sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which held that it might be necessary to censor bad ideas so that the easily confused masses would be more likely to embrace good ideas (good ideas like Marxism! the Marxists would say).
That’s the first argument against free speech; the second, which seems more common among the activists I spoke with, is a kind of repressive safety. Many young people think that speech is not speech at all if it inflicts emotional pain. Emotional pain, they say, is not fundamentally different from physical pain, and since violence is rightly restricted, speech should be as well. Thus the students who shouted down—and then attacked—the conservative writer Charles Murray at Middlebury College, no-platformed his colleague Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis and Clark College, barred would-be attendees from hearing pro-police pundit Heather Mac Donald speak at Claremont McKenna College, chased left-leaning critic Bret Weinstein out of Evergreen State College, and tried to stop the feminist author Alice Dreger from delivering remarks deemed offensive by transgender activists on any number of occasions don’t think they were corrupting free speech. Instead, they think they were merely practicing self-defense on behalf of the oppressed people within their community who would feel upset by the speech in question.
One of the most exhaustively reported of these kinds of incidents occurred at Yale University in the fall of 2015, when several dozen students surrounded Nicholas Christakis, a dean of one of Yale’s colleges, and proceeded to berate him for daring to assert that the administration had no business policing offensive Halloween costumes. These students disagreed; Christakis was their father figure on campus, and the role of every father figure is to protect his children from pain.
“It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students,” said one of the activists.
“It is not about creating an intellectual space!” insisted another. “It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are not doing that. You’re going against that.”
“You have created space for violence,” said yet another student.
Christakis, besieged on all sides, attempted to refute these claims but was simply told: “You can’t.”
Christakis eventually resigned his position. When I spoke with him, he told me something had changed among the students over the years.
“I’ve been an academic for thirty years,” he said. “I don’t recall these types of things before. And most of my colleagues can’t either.”
Many of Christakis’s colleagues probably came of age following the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, in which activist students were committed to making the college campus a welcome place for all viewpoints, no matter how offensive or controversial. Twenty-first-century college activism frequently appears alien to them. (Leftist activism relating to free speech is more fully explored in Chapter Two.)
Hostility to free speech divides leftists from ordinary liberals. Ironically, it’s something the hard left has in common with an increasingly popular strain of far-right white nationalist conservatism known as the alt-right. Much has been written about this group over the last several years, since they are closely identified with Trump, a figure who they believe fits in with their worldview much more comfortably than do traditional Republican leaders such as Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. Despite ho
lding political views that are 180 degrees opposite from the left, the young and almost exclusively male members of the alt-right occasionally seem like insidious doppelgangers—a reaction against, and an extension of, the illiberal currents of the left. They are also hostile to free speech norms, distrustful of the media, and avowed enemies of societal elites, for instance. Their anti-Semitism occasionally overlaps with the far left’s condemnation of capitalism, given the caricature of Jewish people as uniquely influential in the financial sector. The alt-right also shares the far left’s appreciation for identitarianism—the idea that one’s worth and meaning are derived from one’s membership in an identity group based on an immutable characteristic such as race. The alt-right practices “white identity politics,” having co-opted the term from the left’s “identity politics.” And the intellectual leader of the movement, the white nationalist Richard Spencer, has expressed admiration for the tribalism of the left. While it’s still a marginal group, the alt-right is well worth parsing, and it is the subject of the final chapter of this book.
Discomfort with free speech norms is just one thing that makes young activists stand out from previous generations. These and other differences raise larger questions: How did Zillennials come to be this way? At what point did their tactics diverge?
One answer, frequently invoked by conservative media, is that Zillennials are too coddled. Most readers will be familiar with the “delicate snowflake” smear, which is often deployed against young people. “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else”—that is a quote from the 1999 film Fight Club, a mostly faithful adaptation of the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name, which explores themes of male dissatisfaction with consumerism and modernity. (These are chief concerns of the alt-right, for which Fight Club is something of an unintentional bible.) The line became a favorite of the movie’s fans, and “snowflake” appeared in the cultural lexicon as a term of derision evoking fragility and sensitivity, mostly reserved for people on the left. In modern parlance, snowflakes are easily triggered. Snowflakes think offensive speech is violence. Snowflakes want safe spaces.
