The Collapse of the Antiwar Movement

The organized antiwar movement is in terrible shape—fragmented, demoralized, and without forward momentum. This description applies to the Columbia movement as well as to the wider U.S. movement—and those of us who want to stop the war need to figure out what’s wrong as a way to start figuring out what can be done to fix it.

There hasn’t been a national demonstration with attendance over 100,000 for a year, and it doesn’t look likely that this will change anytime soon, with plans for a united protest during the war’s fifth anniversary falling apart in December. The biggest coalition of lobbying-oriented antiwar groups announced last week that it was giving up on getting the current Congress to cut off war funding. Yet, despite the corporate media’s “surge” success narrative, 63 percent of the U.S. populace oppose the war in Iraq, according to the latest CNN poll.

This is hardly the first column to notice the vast gap between mass sentiment and activism. Our generation—especially today’s college students—is often blamed for the disparity. Youth, the story goes, are needed to provide the driving energy for a movement, as they did against the Vietnam War but are failing to do against the Iraq War. The absence is, spun positively, a product of a more pragmatic and up-to-date politics, or, spun negatively, a product of apathy and cynicism.

The story of the absent young people has some truth, but needs caveats. The role of students shouldn’t be romanticized. Among young people, veterans and soldiers have the power to play a much greater role in stopping a war, not because of their age but because of their work. Moreover, the student movement is interdependent with the rest of the national scene. It’s no coincidence that while the Columbia Coalition Against the War could turn out 300 people for a protest last spring when the election of a Democratic Congress on an antiwar platform had boosted activists’ confidence, the group has withered since—as the Democrats have made no serious effort to stop the war, and activists nationally have been largely unable to come up with alternative strategies. Nevertheless, no spin can hide the fact that a category of people historically at the leading edge is far from it today, despite Pew polls showing youth as even more antiwar than the general public.

This failure of opinion to lead to action needs explanation. One obvious factor is the absence of a draft. In almost any other major war, the draft gave young people a direct connection to government policy. It’s easy to blame inaction on the lack of anything personal at stake—especially when, in the aftermath of a banner unfurled on stage or a hunger strike, friends and peers seem more passionate about the effect on the prestige of their degrees than any consequences, positive or negative, relating to political issues. But this argument requires excessive cynicism, and, even assuming total selfishness, its premises are questionable. The relatively privileged Columbia protesters of ’68 had many ways to avoid conscription, while the massive cost of the war for the federal budget and for friends and relatives in the military has a direct impact on most of us today.

The ’60s were also a time of greater economic security, when a college education was a rarer thing and a surer ticket to a decent job. Students today with a greater load of debt may not feel as free to take risks or add non-academic, nonpaying activities. But plenty find time for everything from community service to musical performance.

A perhaps less obvious factor is the recent history of social movements. In the mid-1960s in the U.S., it was very difficult to argue that protest had no impact. After more than a decade of marches and sit-ins, the civil rights movement was well on its way to smashing Jim Crow. In our lifetimes, we have seen nothing comparable.

The most immediate problem, turning the antiwar movement’s stagnation into collapse, is captivity by a pro-war Democratic leadership. The largest component of the antiwar movement has repeatedly focused on electing and then lobbying Democratic politicians, who have nonetheless consistently voted for war funding. In the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections, activists are again lining up behind Clinton and Obama, although neither will promise to have U.S. troops out of Iraq even by 2013. When protests are demobilized for the sake of elections in which none of the viable candidates have taken a genuinely antiwar stance, the movement is without leverage—and if activism seems to lack the power to effect change, only the most dedicated few will be activists.

Some of the problems facing the antiwar movement are essentially impossible for us to do anything about, for now. But some are a matter of political ideas and can be argued out in an immediate way. The next step for the antiwar movement, student and otherwise, has to be a serious discussion of strategy. Electing “more and better” Democrats? Civil disobedience, putting our bodies on the line, whatever our numbers, to try to disrupt the war machine as much as possible right now? Or a long-term effort toward mass mobilization with the intent of making the social cost of continued war too much for the U.S. political establishment? The ongoing slaughter in Iraq makes it imperative that we find the most effective strategy available and do all we can to put it into practice.

David Judd is a senior in the school of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in computer science. The Point, However runs alternate Fridays.
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