Opposing the Protests

A number of posts have discussed the politics of protest.

YouGov survey on campus protest:

Americans are more likely to strongly or somewhat oppose (47%) than support (28%) pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses throughout the country in recent weeks, according to a YouGov poll this week of 9,012 U.S. adults.

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A growing number of students have been arrested, leading some to question whether administrators who allowed these arrests have overstepped. Others argue that even more force should be used. Our survey shows that twice as many Americans believe college administrators have not responded to the protests harshly enough (33%) as say administrators' response has been too harsh (16%). 20% say it has been about right and 31% are not sure. Half of Americans 45 and older believe administrators haven't been harsh enough (48%); a much smaller share of adults under 44 think this (16%).

Encampments are being established by pro-Palestinian protesters at college campuses across the country.

Last year, 25% of Americans said that encampments are usually or always acceptable as a form of protest. More Americans view it as acceptable to……

Create a petition: 61%… pic.twitter.com/rbOsdNC4vT

— YouGov America (@YouGovAmerica) April 26, 2024

Religion and Abortion Opinion

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.   

PRRI:

Majorities across most religious traditions say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, including Unitarian Universalists (93%), Jewish Americans (81%), Buddhists (79%), other Catholics of color (73%), Black Protestants (71%), white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (68%), white Catholics (62%), Muslims (60%), Hispanic Catholics (57%), and other Protestants of color (52%). By contrast, Jehovah’s Witnesses (25%), white evangelical Protestants (27%), Latter-day Saints (30%), and Hispanic Protestants (40%) are the only major religious groups in which less than half of adherents support the legality of abortion. Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, 87% say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

Student Protest Then and Now

 Jeff Greenfield at Politico:

The political consequences of the upheaval became clear. While the doomed liberal campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy draw most of the focus in retrospectives of the era, the fact is that in November of 1968, Nixon and Wallace combined for 57 percent of the vote, close to the levels of historic landslide wins of LBJ in 1964 and Reagan in 1984.

Even after the Vietnam War faded as an issue with the end of the draft and the withdrawal of most American troops, the impact of those campus protests retained political heft — and gave a boost to the right.

In November of 1968, a professor of semantics named S.I. Hayakawa became interim president of San Francisco State University, a campus beset by protests and strikes. Two weeks later he climbed onto a sound truck used by the demonstrators and ripped the wires. That image, and his subsequent efforts to break student and faculty strikes and restore normal classes, made him something of a folk hero — so much so that years later, in 1976, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate as a Republican.

It would be folly to draw exact parallels between today’s unrest and those of 60 years ago. But some do resonate. Peaceful and lawful protests are out there, but they don’t have the same visual impact as police tangling with demonstrators; seeing protesters replacing American flags with Palestinian flags does bring back images of Americans waving the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags; and the sight of students attending an $80,000 a year university making it impossible for anyone to teach or study gives a very different meaning to the word “privilege.”

Student Protest

Jon Keller at CBS Boston:

You've seen the crowds and heard the rhetoric. But what impact is all the campus turmoil over the war in Gaza having on public opinion?

Not much, according to Dritan Nesho, co-director of the nationwide Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)/Harris poll, where monthly surveys have found "support for Israel has been fairly consistent." Among the striking findings of their April survey:

• While 59% think Muslim students face Islamophobia on campus, the 69% who see antisemitism there has come on strong. "That number wouldn't have been stratospherically high, and it is very high, even as recently as one year ago," said Nesho.
• Two-thirds of voters today believe that it's not safe to be openly Jewish on university campuses, and a huge majority favor suspension for students or teachers who call for violence against Jews, which is what many onlookers hear in common protestor chants. "The majority of the public, and the majority of voters, are not with the protestors," Nesho said.
• Among the 64% who believe there's a "problem" with what higher ed institutions are teaching students these days, 40 percent identified racially divisive theories, 34 percent cited a lack of political diversity, 33 percent deplored the promotion of anti-Americanism, and 27% cited teachings that promote antisemitism.

Even if they're isolated incidents, says Nesho, every time a protestor praises or excuses Hamas, it's a public relations disaster.

"Public opinion is pro-Israel, and public opinion is pro-Palestinian, but public opinion is anti-Hamas," he noted.

Remember the old Beatles song "Revolution"? There was a line in it: "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."

The Founding and Its Enemies

Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Robert Kagan at WP:

Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy, and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the Revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the Revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.

Federal Workforce

 CBO:

• The Department of Defense employs 34 percent of the federal civilian workforce. Those employees work in hundreds of different occupations, but the most common are information technology worker, program analyst, and contract manager.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs employs 19 percent of the federal civilian workforce. Because that department operates roughly 1,300 health care facilities for veterans, about 60 percent of its employees work in various medical professions, the most common of which is nursing.
• The Department of Homeland Security employs 9 percent of the federal civilian workforce. The most common job in that department is inspector for the Transportation Security Administration, which accounts for 22 percent of the department’s employees.

Compared with private-sector employees, the average compensation costs for federal employees in 2022 were greater among workers whose education culminated in a bachelor’s degree or less, but lower among workers with more education.

Rightward Snapback

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.   Democrats thought they saw a leftward shift in 2020.  They were mistaken.  As we explain, "defund the police" hurt the Democrats in key congressional races.  California voters rejected affirmative action.  Immigration remained problematic.

Neal Rothschild at Axios:

The big picture: Across politics, business, education and the economy, a number of the sudden, radical shifts we experienced in 2020 have proven short-lived.

1. DEI: America's racial justice reckoning after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 led many organizations to hire diversity officers and invest heavily in efforts to address racial inequality.Over the past two years, conservatives have waged a remarkably successful war against those initiatives — prompting many companies to cut DEI funding and drop racial justice as a talking point.

2. Policing: Amid the 2020 protests and calls to defund the police, a number of cities cut their law enforcement budgets.The next year, many of those cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas — restored and even increased police funding in response to surging violent crime.

Police reforms are now being rolled back in cities and states across the country, with "defund the police" shifting from a progressive slogan to a Republican weapon that very few Democrats align with.

3. Immigration: During his 2020 campaign, President Biden cast former President Trump's harsh border policies as part of a "battle for the soul of the country" that inspired his decision to run.Amid a record wave of migrants illegally crossing the border over the last several years, Biden is now considering a dramatic executive order that would impose Trump-like restrictions on asylum-seekers.

Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they'd support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to an Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll released Thursday.