Pratap Bhanu Mehta Writes: Behind Student Anger in US, Three Crises — Democracy, University, Protest
Pratap Bhanu Mehta | 26 April 2024 | The Indian Express
The widespread protests against the war in Gaza across dozens of US university campuses, and the unprecedented crackdowns are a sign of a triple crisis: Of liberal democracy, of the university, and paradoxically, of anti-war protests as well.
The protests are a sign of the crisis of liberal democracy in three ways. First, we should not forget that these protests have been occasioned by the fact that the American political system has been virtually immune to the catastrophic horror that is unfolding in Gaza, since Hamas’s barbaric attacks on Israel. Both America, which has the greatest leverage on Israel, and the international community, have met the horror of Gaza with moral abdication. The protests are a product of that suffocating sense of thwarted political agency that a lot of young people feel. They are also a consequence of the larger failure of a democratic system that has closed ranks allowing atrocities to unfold in Gaza, often even in the face of public opinion. The students are, perhaps inchoately, attempting that work of moral repair…