The GOP Is Making Campus Protests a 2024 Law-and-Order Issue

Mike Johnson calls for a campus crackdown at Columbia. Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu

Up until now, Republicans have mostly avoided getting into the middle of high-profile arguments over the Israel-Hamas war. Yes, many of them are aligned with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu and the right-wing expansionists in Israeli politics, who have welcomed the opportunity to assault Gaza in an uninhibited manner. And in Congress, they were in the vanguard of those supporting robust and unconditional military assistance to Israel. But Donald Trump has set the tone of GOP commentary on the war and its implications, blaming it all on President Joe Biden’s alleged “weakness” and focusing on other issues like border security, inflation, and crime while Democrats argue passionately over their president’s policies.

In a single day, exemplified by two dramatic developments, Republicans jumped off the sidelines in order to attack pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses as a major threat to law and order. First, Trump went out of his way to depict campus protests as vastly more violent and alarming than the 2017 white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville that damaged his own presidency after he remarked there were “very fine people on both sides.” He wrote on Truth Social:

Then Trump’s congressional acolyte, Speaker Mike Johnson, flew up to New York for an unsolicited appearance at Columbia University, during which he characterized pro-Palestinian campus protests as essentially antisemitic and a major threat to public order. As CNN explained:

“We just can’t allow this kind of hatred and antisemitism to flourish on our campuses, and it must be stopped in its tracks. Those who are perpetrating this violence should be arrested. I am here today joining my colleagues, and calling on President Shafik to resign if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos,” Johnson said Wednesday …

Johnson also said he would call President Joe Biden immediately after departing and demand he take action, not ruling out the need for the National Guard to step in at some point.

New York governor Kathy Hochul, not Biden or Johnson, is the public official in charge of calling out the Guard in rare and extreme cases. But the Speaker justified the massive breach of protocol he committed in barging into the tense situation at Columbia as moral obligation, per the Hill:

“Speaker Johnson is going to speak to students at Columbia University because Governor Hochul and other officials in New York have completely failed in their duty to protect Jewish students and combat the rise of antisemitism in their party,” a spokesperson from the speaker’s office said in a statement. “We wish it weren’t necessary.”

Yeah, right. Johnson’s eagerness to simultaneously demand a crackdown on protesters while preemptively calling for the heads of allegedly permissive college administrators shows how decisively the GOP is politicizing the situation. Certainly the Speaker has reason to appear as hard-core conservative as possible in the wake of his foreign-aid victory over ultra-MAGA members of his conference. But his sudden bloodthirstiness was anticipated by Senate Republicans Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted earlier this week:

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.”

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia.

An even more conspicuous pioneer of this approach to campus protests is New York congresswoman and potential Trump VP pick Elise Stefanik, who got enormous publicity back in December for hearings in which she raked elite-college presidents over the coals for alleged tolerance of antisemitism in the name of free speech. Her role in helping force resignations from University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay showed how politically profitable it could be for Republicans to combine their long-standing law-and-order, anti-woke, and anti-elite thematics into a mighty roar aimed at multiple “enemies of the people.” It’s just too tempting to pass up, even at the cost of placing the GOP decisively on one side of the Israel-Hamas conflict at a time when public opinion seems to be moving in a different direction.

There’s a historical analogy here. As antiwar protests broke out on campuses all over the United States alongside Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, Republican politicians otherwise happy to let people on all sides of the issue complain about “LBJ’s War” were drawn into the fray to denounce radical students and the permissive college administrators and liberal elected officials who refused to rein them in. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace spent more time appealing to anti–anti–Vietnam War sentiment than on defending the war itself. Wallace drew lusty cheers regularly with his boast that “if any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.” For Reagan’s breakthrough 1966 gubernatorial campaign, “campus radicalism was a goldmine,” says one historian. “Rhetorically, he tied the ‘rioting’ and ‘anarchy’ of Berkeley students to academic freedom run amok and communist professors indoctrinating the next generation.” And when Nixon developed his signature shout-out to the “silent majority,” it was noisy student protesters he used as a foil.

If today’s Republicans go down the same road, they run the risk of letting Biden off the hook a bit as the current bête noire of Americans upset by the human toll of the war in Gaza. But pro-Palestinian protesters on elite-college campuses are just too tempting a target for the party of conservative cultural resentment.