Chile’s recent experience, in which the popular protests and left-wing agitation of 2019 have given way to a wave of reaction, shows that progressives do not always grasp the obvious that people’s right to personal safety comes first. After a spring of widespread campus protests, the US could experience a similar political swing.
LONDON – He is the unlikely protagonist of a wannabe blockbuster: a balding, pudgy, jug-eared shopkeeper. The plot is just as unlikely: outside, the young protesters marching down the avenue clamoring for equality and freedom; inside, the middle-aged sandwich-maker struggling to keep his shop from being vandalized yet one more time.
You wouldn’t have guessed it: the unglamorous shopkeeper turns out to be the good guy, and the glamorous demonstrators, biceps glistening and flags aloft, are the bad guys. Petty bourgeois values (“I am fighting to defend my little hole in the wall, my only source of income,” mutters the protagonist) carry the day.
The film, entitled La Fuente (The Fountain), to be released later this year, neatly encapsulates the evolution of public opinion in Chile over the last five years. When protests erupted in October 2019, polls revealed widespread support for the movement. Over a million people took to the streets of Santiago, the capital, in a single afternoon. Chile has awakened, bellowed local intellectuals, and the international press repeated the slogan.
Fast-forward a few months, to the day pandemic lockdowns brought the protests to an end: hundreds of shops and supermarkets vandalized and often burned to the ground, two dozen subway stations (mostly serving poor neighborhoods) torched, public infrastructure (from park benches to community centers) ransacked and destroyed. Downtown Santiago was left looking like a war zone, with graffiti-covered walls and debris everywhere.
Fast-forward again, this time to September 2022: the far-left constitutional draft demanded by the demonstrators, written by an assembly in which radicals had the working majority, is rejected by 62% of voters.
Now fast-forward to the present: octubrismo (the ideology behind the October 2019 protests) has become a dirty word. Income distribution and the quality of public education are no longer citizens’ top concerns; crime is, along with immigration and drug-trafficking. Polls suggest that the next president of Chile will be a conservative. The main doubt is whether it will be someone from the center-right or the populist, authoritarian right.
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For the Chilean left, it is hard to conceive of a more colossal failure. It somehow managed to snatch a series of defeats from the jaws of victory. Yet the underlying issue is not about tactics, but concepts. As a liberal, I harbor no doubt that liberty and equality are paramount political goals. But before we can have liberty and equality, we must have political order.
That was the point of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: without a state that has the monopoly over coercion, life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Francis Fukuyama, in The Origins of Political Order, explores the issue in painstaking historical detail. It is also the point, of course, of the Chilean shopkeeper’s travails: his most fundamental right – one that he is willing to fight for – is the right to personal safety, the right not to have his shop windows smashed or his counters set on fire as he tries to feed his customers.
As Chile’s recent experience reveals, progressives do not always grasp that obvious point. And Chile is not alone. Much the same happened in the United States in the 1960s, when widespread campus protests were followed by Richard Nixon’s election. And in France, where May 1968 cleared the way for a sweep by the Gaullist party just a month later, in an election that cost the socialist and communist parties dozens of seats.
I have been reminded of this conundrum by the campus protests over the Hamas-Israel conflict. Again, there are issues over which there should be no disagreement. The rights to free speech, dissent, and peaceful demonstration are essential, especially on college campuses. Universities should be places where people can speak freely, however unpopular their views, without fear of retribution. It is university administrators’ job to uphold those rights.
But there are two complicating twists. One is that the demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, but not universally so. At the University of California, Los Angeles, “physical altercations broke out,” as one university official put it.Scuffles have also taken place elsewhere. When such confrontations occur, university administrators cannot stand by.
A second and more fundamental issue, as John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, is that my rights end where yours begin. In a liberal society, we are entitled to do or say what we please as long as we do not limit, even unintentionally, the right of others to do the same.
Applying these principles on university campuses is a thorny task. When does an encampment, with makeshift access to electrical power, become a safety hazard? At which point does chanting in a college quad impede studying or exam-taking? Is blocking access to university buildings by protesters ever justified? Which chants or slogans, moreover, can be justifiably viewed as threatening – and therefore unacceptable – by other members of the university community? University leaders have provided different answers to these difficult questions, with consequences that have not always been happy.
The atmospherics surrounding the demonstrations also matter a great deal. As a university professor, I am moved by the sight of students from both sides marching for what they think is right, and I have not been surprised to hear fellow academics make impassioned speeches about the importance of freedom of expression on campus. Nor have I been surprised to see the lengthy quotes those speeches earn in the mainstream media.
I have been surprised, however, by the paucity of paeans to the students who fear that their learning may have been affected. Or to the family that saved for years to send their child to college, and proudly arrived on campus to celebrate their graduate, only to learn that the ceremony had been canceled.
And I would not be surprised to learn that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is quietly celebrating (and conducting intensive polling on the issue). The ghosts of Berkeley in 1964 and Paris in 1968 (and Santiago in 2019, though few Americans will know about it), summoned by UCLA, Harvard, and Columbia in 2024, could appear just in time for the November US presidential election. Now, that would certainly be worth demonstrating against. Count me in.
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LONDON – He is the unlikely protagonist of a wannabe blockbuster: a balding, pudgy, jug-eared shopkeeper. The plot is just as unlikely: outside, the young protesters marching down the avenue clamoring for equality and freedom; inside, the middle-aged sandwich-maker struggling to keep his shop from being vandalized yet one more time.
You wouldn’t have guessed it: the unglamorous shopkeeper turns out to be the good guy, and the glamorous demonstrators, biceps glistening and flags aloft, are the bad guys. Petty bourgeois values (“I am fighting to defend my little hole in the wall, my only source of income,” mutters the protagonist) carry the day.
The film, entitled La Fuente (The Fountain), to be released later this year, neatly encapsulates the evolution of public opinion in Chile over the last five years. When protests erupted in October 2019, polls revealed widespread support for the movement. Over a million people took to the streets of Santiago, the capital, in a single afternoon. Chile has awakened, bellowed local intellectuals, and the international press repeated the slogan.
Fast-forward a few months, to the day pandemic lockdowns brought the protests to an end: hundreds of shops and supermarkets vandalized and often burned to the ground, two dozen subway stations (mostly serving poor neighborhoods) torched, public infrastructure (from park benches to community centers) ransacked and destroyed. Downtown Santiago was left looking like a war zone, with graffiti-covered walls and debris everywhere.
Fast-forward again, this time to September 2022: the far-left constitutional draft demanded by the demonstrators, written by an assembly in which radicals had the working majority, is rejected by 62% of voters.
Now fast-forward to the present: octubrismo (the ideology behind the October 2019 protests) has become a dirty word. Income distribution and the quality of public education are no longer citizens’ top concerns; crime is, along with immigration and drug-trafficking. Polls suggest that the next president of Chile will be a conservative. The main doubt is whether it will be someone from the center-right or the populist, authoritarian right.
Secure your copy of PS Quarterly: The Climate Crucible
The newest issue of our magazine, PS Quarterly: The Climate Crucible, is here. To gain digital access to all of the magazine’s content, and receive your print copy, subscribe to PS Premium now.
Subscribe Now
For the Chilean left, it is hard to conceive of a more colossal failure. It somehow managed to snatch a series of defeats from the jaws of victory. Yet the underlying issue is not about tactics, but concepts. As a liberal, I harbor no doubt that liberty and equality are paramount political goals. But before we can have liberty and equality, we must have political order.
That was the point of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: without a state that has the monopoly over coercion, life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Francis Fukuyama, in The Origins of Political Order, explores the issue in painstaking historical detail. It is also the point, of course, of the Chilean shopkeeper’s travails: his most fundamental right – one that he is willing to fight for – is the right to personal safety, the right not to have his shop windows smashed or his counters set on fire as he tries to feed his customers.
As Chile’s recent experience reveals, progressives do not always grasp that obvious point. And Chile is not alone. Much the same happened in the United States in the 1960s, when widespread campus protests were followed by Richard Nixon’s election. And in France, where May 1968 cleared the way for a sweep by the Gaullist party just a month later, in an election that cost the socialist and communist parties dozens of seats.
I have been reminded of this conundrum by the campus protests over the Hamas-Israel conflict. Again, there are issues over which there should be no disagreement. The rights to free speech, dissent, and peaceful demonstration are essential, especially on college campuses. Universities should be places where people can speak freely, however unpopular their views, without fear of retribution. It is university administrators’ job to uphold those rights.
But there are two complicating twists. One is that the demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, but not universally so. At the University of California, Los Angeles, “physical altercations broke out,” as one university official put it. Scuffles have also taken place elsewhere. When such confrontations occur, university administrators cannot stand by.
A second and more fundamental issue, as John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, is that my rights end where yours begin. In a liberal society, we are entitled to do or say what we please as long as we do not limit, even unintentionally, the right of others to do the same.
Applying these principles on university campuses is a thorny task. When does an encampment, with makeshift access to electrical power, become a safety hazard? At which point does chanting in a college quad impede studying or exam-taking? Is blocking access to university buildings by protesters ever justified? Which chants or slogans, moreover, can be justifiably viewed as threatening – and therefore unacceptable – by other members of the university community? University leaders have provided different answers to these difficult questions, with consequences that have not always been happy.
The atmospherics surrounding the demonstrations also matter a great deal. As a university professor, I am moved by the sight of students from both sides marching for what they think is right, and I have not been surprised to hear fellow academics make impassioned speeches about the importance of freedom of expression on campus. Nor have I been surprised to see the lengthy quotes those speeches earn in the mainstream media.
I have been surprised, however, by the paucity of paeans to the students who fear that their learning may have been affected. Or to the family that saved for years to send their child to college, and proudly arrived on campus to celebrate their graduate, only to learn that the ceremony had been canceled.
And I would not be surprised to learn that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is quietly celebrating (and conducting intensive polling on the issue). The ghosts of Berkeley in 1964 and Paris in 1968 (and Santiago in 2019, though few Americans will know about it), summoned by UCLA, Harvard, and Columbia in 2024, could appear just in time for the November US presidential election. Now, that would certainly be worth demonstrating against. Count me in.