U.S. President Donald Trump addresses a House Republican retreat at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Jan. 6.Alex Wong/Getty Images
As a child of the sixties and seventies, I grew up on some of the greatest music ever made. And many of the most iconic recordings of that period were inspired by protest, motivated by the rage boiling up in young people over the actions of the U.S. government.
It’s said that Neil Young wrote his searing diatribe Ohio in less than an hour after seeing photos in Life magazine of the anti-war demonstration at Kent State University that resulted in the shooting deaths, by Ohio National Guard members, of four student protesters.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own / This summer I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio.”
There were other songs that chronicled the mood of the time: War by Edwin Starr, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, and perhaps my favourite, Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival. It, too, was the product of growing frustration inside America’s counterculture movement over the actions of a federal government many saw as acting with impunity.
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Fortunate Son took aim at the unfairness of the mandatory military draft and how kids whose parents were rich or connected avoided being conscripted – hello, Donald Trump – while those of the poor and working classes became fodder for the country’s disastrous ambitions in the jungles of Vietnam. (Ironically enough, Mr. Trump would use Fortunate Son as a campaign song during his 2024 presidential campaign. And more recently, he posted footage of the U.S. raid on Venezuela set to the same anti-war classic.)
The music of the sixties and seventies formed the soundtrack of the anti-war movement. Protests were common. Despite the threat of beatings – or worse – by police, young people took to the streets to voice their anger over a government that seemingly cared only about power.
It’s hard not to juxtapose that epoch with today and not be shocked by the silence that has largely greeted the actions of a President who poses an almost existential threat to the world’s oldest continuous constitutional democracy. Sure, there were the No Kings rallies that were held throughout the U.S. last year. And there have been sporadic protests against the administration’s cavalier roundup of suspected illegal immigrants. But there isn’t anywhere near the level of public fury and angst one might have anticipated, given the country’s rich history of organized protests.
What you also notice about the demographic makeup of the protests that have been held is how they skew largely to the boomer generation. Why is that?
My guess is many young people can’t be bothered taking to the streets because they feel it’s pointless. Some of the students on college campuses today took part in the March for Our Lives demonstrations held throughout the U.S. eight years ago. Those rallies were in response to the gun violence and mass shootings in American schools. What did they accomplish? Nothing. Today, many Americans simply accept school shootings as a fact of life in their country.
Maybe it’s not a surprise, then, that one detects an almost omnipresent defeatism among young people in America. Students have watched university after university fold in the face of threats from Mr. Trump. They’ve seen many of the country’s top law firms do the same. So perhaps it’s natural they might feel intimidated, too; they might fear retribution, for instance, if they were identified at an anti-government protest. It’s not like it’s beyond the realm of possibility.
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There is also likely some trepidation about getting hurt or shot by anti-protest forces that may feel emboldened by a lawless President accountable to no one. The spineless partisan puppets masquerading as Republican lawmakers have ceded total authority to the man, an unconscionable fact they must live with for the rest of their days.
Far from being hotbeds of anti-administration discourse, U.S. college campuses have been welcoming grounds to those espousing the kind of exclusionary, bigoted beliefs held by Mr. Trump and his acolytes. Hard-right voices like Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro and the late Charlie Kirk have helped a new conservative (and white nationalist) advocacy take root at American universities.
The fact that a hopelessness, an ennui, seems to have gripped America at one of its darkest hours is beyond dismaying. Mr. Trump just seized a foreign leader and replaced him with a puppet who has been ordered to do the U.S.’s bidding, or else. Mr. Trump wants Venezuelan oil – now. And all indications are that U.S. hegemony won’t stop there.
Once upon a time, musicians provided the drum beat of opposition to a shameful administration in Washington. Today, America needs to hear those sounds again, needs to awaken to the dangerous outrages being perpetrated on their country and the world by a corrupt leader.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that police were responsible for the 1970 shooting deaths of four student protesters at Kent State University. Members of the Ohio National Guard were responsible.