The barricades. The passion. The patchouli. A campus protest and student rebellion that threatens to engulf a tired establishment. This time round, the police used flash-bang grenades rather than tear gas to clear out Hamilton Hall. But this is a detail, not a difference, and the parallels between 1968 and 2024 on the Columbia University campus are obvious. The historical rhymes extend well beyond such surface symbolism. Outraged by racism and injustice at home, protesters have coalesced around a foreign war. Like the New Left before them, Zoomers refuse to be “Good Germans”. More broadly, they oppose what to their minds is a racist, fascist, and imperialist system. Meanwhile, a bland Democratic institutionalist watches his re-election prospects wither. His wily, law-and-order foe senses opportunity.

It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968. And this is no coincidence — many of the protesters see themselves as revivalists, resurrecting the pose and the politics of a more heroic era. But a closer examination of the trajectory of the 1968 generation reveals the Columbia crop to be little more than a patchy historical shadow. Because while the 2024 generation are ultimately the grandchildren of 1968, they are also its epigones, and placing the two political movements side by side is an object lesson in the difference between the authentic and ersatz.

Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 Columbia University protests, was a typical New Leftist. He entered college from the mid-Sixties middle class — apolitical, yet vaguely jaundiced. He longed for an “intellectual avant-garde”. He had tired of watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold from the side-lines. He drifted in such frustrations until discovering Malcolm X who taught him that “the division in the world is between the oppressed—who are mainly people of color—and the oppressors—who are mainly white”. In a phrase, this is how Rudd and the New Leftists could link their domestic situation to Vietnam and American foreign policy.