Written by Joel Schlossberg
“Voo. Day!” he declared on the cover of the New York Post on May 2nd. Despite jubilant headlines and forecasts of “mostly sunny and warm,” the national mood in early May is even gloomier than that morning in America.
After all, even the classic Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May took time to reveal the extent of the challenge to the American way, rather than revealing it from day one.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams reportedly thinks it is “despicable to allow schools to fly the flag of another country in our country.” (Did Adams forget the Israeli flags unfurled by counter-protesters or the countless banners he saw on his school trip to the United Nations?)
More than what the paranoid Post fictionalized on the Hamilton mixtape: “It’s amazing how the word ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word in a country founded by immigrants.” It is more historically true that founder Alexander Hamilton supported the Alien Act and the Sedition Act. Still, we should be calm about the university population, which they liken to an axis.
Historian James Loewen highlighted that public opinion polls have consistently found support for the Vietnam and Iraq wars among people with a college education. The anti-war protesters were the “loud minority” who have been featured on the 139th cover of Mad Magazine since 1970.
Even many who don’t see the protesters as a fifth column on campus share the frustration of Robert Schaefer, author of “The Resentment of Achievement.” He sees the “larger class of taxpayers” as leading to “much less concern for productive activities” than those who prefer to spend their time. He said of a pursuit that “brings far more benefits” than “participating in probably futile protests.”
Hefty financial subsidies extend to nominally private American educational institutions, curtailing their acumen in allocating resources inside and outside of the classroom. But, as Loewen points out, funding serves as a “bulwark of loyalty” to the state. Paralleling “mass schooling” in Castro’s Cuba and Maoist China, the result is a student body far more loyal to the United States than the ghosts of the Soviet Union.
Ronald Radosh was haunted when he wrote about visiting Union Square, New York’s “historic center of radical protest,” when he was literally a baby in a red diaper. In the summer of 2001, he became “increasingly cynical” that the May Day parade was “the first step on a journey to America, the country of my birth but one I didn’t fully discover until middle age.” I felt it. Ironically, that celebration began not with his 20th-century Kremlin, but with 19th-century Chicago labor activists. Hippolito Havel pointed out that organizers like Albert Parsons and Dyer Lamb based their ideas on the American experience, which were dismissed as “foreign poison brought into the United States from decadent Europe.” .
For a century before Schaefer’s proposal, pro-freedom Americans, inspired by the first May Day, had been marching “against government restrictions on our freedoms.” As Liberty’s Benjamin Tucker recommended in 1884, supporters needed to “not even gather in the streets, but stay at home and defend their rights” to gain support.
Joel Schlossberg is a senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
