The Obama administration—easily the most ideologically progressive in modern American history—has been accompanied by both liberal triumphalism and liberal outrage.
Three major protest movements have marked the Obama era: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the as-yet-unnamed campus protests that began at the University of Missouri and Yale and have now spread across the country. The Occupy movement failed utterly. The Black Lives Matter movement has been on a fast track to irrelevance, its only success having been to discipline Democratic presidential candidates to deny that "all" lives matter, while insisting that "black" lives do.
The campus protests are different. At one school after another, protesters have achieved the resignation and/or humiliation of high officials. They have extorted a great deal of money. They have tried to establish new conventions for the behavior of the media and have even intensified what may prove to be a serious debate about the future of the First Amendment. And in all of this it has become clear that the campus protests aren't about race or privilege or safe spaces. They're about power.
Seen from a certain angle, the campus protests are anomalous—the result of a freakishly improbable chain of events. If Michael Brown had not been shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, there would be no Black Lives Matter movement. The Concerned Student 1950 protests that grew out of Black Lives Matter this fall could not have happened at any school other than the University of Missouri, because while Ferguson was national news, it was also an intensely local story. And the Mizzou campus is a two-hour drive from Ferguson.
The chain gets longer. University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe was unpopular for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with race. For instance, he was appointed president in 2011 despite a total lack of academic experience. As sportswriter Jason Whitlock noted, the school's curators "plucked Wolfe out of the unemployment line," for no discernible reason, at the end of a closed hiring process that reeked of favoritism.
Even so, Wolfe probably could have survived Concerned Student 1950. Except that one of the protest leaders, a 25-year-old black graduate student named Jonathan Butler, went on a well-publicized hunger strike, declaring that he would eat again only once Wolfe was out of his job. (Butler, by the way, comes from an extremely wealthy family in Omaha. His father, a railroad executive, made $8.4 million last year. In the Occupy era, he would have been part of the villainous 1 percent.) But even Butler's hunger strike probably wouldn't have mattered except that the former high-school football player was friendly with a number of players on the Mizzou team. (Mizzou's most famous liberal activist/football alum, the gay former defensive end Michael Sam, stopped by early on to lend support to Butler.)
Meanwhile, the Mizzou team was mired in a terrible season. They were 4-5 with a locker room divided over a quarterback controversy. Inspired by Butler's example, some of the black players decided that, since the team's season was effectively over, they would "strike"—that is, refuse to fulfill the obligations of their athletic scholarships—until Wolfe was gone. In an ordinary situation, you might expect the coach to step in and enforce some order. After all, supporting mutiny against a sitting university president guarantees that no other university president will ever hire you for another coaching job. But again, there was a wrinkle: Head coach Gary Pinkel had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and was in the process of checking out of his career.
