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.

This was key to turning the Civil Rights movement into a larger New Left. The batons, German shepherds, and firehoses that the racist South used as its weapons had already permanently changed how Rudd, and many in his generation, viewed their country. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and the student wing of the civil rights movement served as their activist model. Their villain was George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who was taken to define America at home. Once Vietnam was thrown into the mix, New Leftists could think of their nation as George Wallace home and abroad — racist, fascist, and irredeemably imperialist.

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This 21st-century movement opts for a similar synthesis, tying their Gaza activism to their anti-racist background. Like the original New Left, the culture war over American society in the last decade has led them on a journey from racial optimism to remorseless antagonism. It began with Barack Obama, the Zoomer John Kennedy. Charismatic and cool, Obama symbolised an ascendant “post-racial” America when the nation could still believe in change through traditional political channels. But Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, Michael Brown’s 2014 shooting, and the Ferguson Riots began to punch holes in this fantasy before, like the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Donald Trump’s election and George Floyd, radicalised a generation.

Once at college, the institutional pressures were there to bake these ingredients into a very 1968 mould: the 2024 student protesters sound and act like the New Left because they are trained by an institutionalised New Left at elite universities. This is why the intone the very same language and misapply identical principles. In 1968, Rudd founded his protest upon Columbia’s “racism and support for imperialism”. Now, 56 years later, Jawuanna McAllister a Cornell University student protester defines her philosophy: “we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist… none of us can be free… unless all of us are free”. It’s Freaky Friday — the student protest edition, except this time there is no generation gap on campus.

But though they imbibe and spout the same ideas, the modern protest movement dwells in a completely different context to its grandparent. In the Sixties, elite colleges and universities were institutionally conservative: the University of California even prohibited all political activity on campus. It was that total (and unreasonable) prohibition which prompted the original free-speech movement. At Columbia meanwhile, Mark Rudd sipped sherry with “tame and bloodless” professors in dreary afternoon seminars on Aristotle. At Swarthmore, future Weather Underground leaders Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin endured curfews, dined on white tablecloths, and organised formal dinners.

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Today, these very same campuses actively market themselves as Left-wing activist finishing schools. Cornell’s student union features a plaque commemorating armed takeover of the building in 1969. At Atlanta’s Emory University, Arts and Social Justice Fellows help students translate their learning into “creative activism in the name of social justice”. And Columbia, which is euphemistically called “Protest Ivy”, brings activist alumni to campus to woo potential students, while its two-semester core “Contemporary Civilization” is effectively a reading list for the 2024 activists. On the list are as many texts on the Haitian Constitution (three) as there are on the American, while the post-1945 readings are devoted exclusively to anticolonialism, race, sex and gender, and climate change. Unlike the Boomers who lived in a conservative social milieu amid establishment liberal ideas, the Zoomers scarcely encounter any contemporary notion to the Right of the Combahee River Collective or Frantz Fanon.

And this gets at the heart of the crucial difference between 2024 and 1968. Rudd, and his contemporaries, rebelled. Their movement, and its excesses, were born amid social upheaval and intellectual ferment. This certainly resulted in some misjudged actions and overheated rhetoric: when I interviewed Rudd, he freely admitted this. But one can understand, if not always defend, the New Left’s actions because of the scale of the political context. They imagined themselves battling racist oppression at home and imperialism abroad — because they were. In 1963, George Wallace had vowed to preserve segregation forever. Selma’s Bloody Sunday was a current event. Western imperialism was a present-day fact. What LBJ saw as the domino theory in Vietnam was instead a final act in Vietnam’s decades-long quest for independence, which America was denying through its war.

This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden. Protesters fundamentally misunderstand the very injustices they protest. And, trained by the old-New Left, they see American racism as frozen in 1968 amber, even though the material basis for racial inequality has fundamentally shifted. In 1968, to be black was to be in the American underclass: in 1960, only 10% of African Americans held a middle-class job. But the very victories of Civil Rights have changed that equation.

William Julius Wilson, the preeminent urban sociologist of his era, finds that class has become stickier than race in determining life chances. For the half of all black families that are now middle-class as a result, this is good news. And though they still suffer the worst, working-class African Americans are the victims of the same globalised economy as their white and brown brethren. There has not been a complete revolution: drive along any of America’s 955 Martin Luther King Boulevards and you will see reasons for pessimism. African-American men are still disproportionately victims of police violence. But this no longer a product of racialised legislation, but of the fact that poor Americans, of all races, are the disproportionate victims of a militarised police state.

And in several ways this is worse than 1968. Because this time it is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole. Benjamin Netanyahu can more easily ignore shrill exaggerations: the war grinds on; Palestinians suffer. The Zoomer Left hasn’t responded to this reality — it doesn’t even try. Instead, it sets about exemplifying Rob Henderson’s luxury belief motif, where anti-war activism confers social prestige on the educated elite. The cultural geography of the current protests is equally telling in this regard. These protests are stationed at elite campuses, the “Ivy plus” institutions where children of elites predominate. The New Left admittedly started with upper-middle-class kids at elite schools. But hundreds of middle-class state colleges eventually erupted in protest. In 1970, normie Kent State University in Ohio became the symbol of a mass youth rebellion.

Anti-racism at home and Zionism-as-imperialism abroad is a nifty way to redirect focus from this reality. And just as Tom Barson, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia uprising, has written, the roots of the tumult are not so much social anomie as it is “deflection”. Otherwise, the student elites might observe their professional middle class has gobbled up 83% of the America’s wealth since 1989. Or that the income gap between college and non-college was a mere 10% in the Seventies (today it is 70%). They could notice that the just over 500, mostly urban, coastal counties where they reside is home to 70% of all wealth, and that an epidemic of “deaths of despair” tears through the thousands of counties left behind. They might even notice that today it is college that separates the underclass from everyone else — and that it should be the cause of social protest, not its incubator.

The Columbia protesters are too coiled up in political introversion to notice these historical ironies. And that is why they will only end up repeating the greatest Sixties irony of them all. After all the fury of that decade, its greatest political achievement was to pave Richard Nixon’s route to the presidency, shattering the coalition that had carried LBJ to a landslide in 1964. By broadcasting the worst of the modern Left to America and its “silent majority”, these students can do the same, sabotaging the current government and boosting a crook to the White House.

These recent scenes in South America, so reminiscent of pre-pandemic times, will be reassuring for some — but will send a shudder down the spines of many in the region hardest hit by Covid-19.

Latin America became the pandemic’s epicentre this summer, when it recorded over a quarter of the world’s confirmed coronavirus cases, despite being home to only 8% of its population. The region accounts for over 415,000 Covid-19 related deaths — that’s around one in every three of the global total.

Brazil, with its football stadiums converted into makeshift hospitals and its mass graves hastily dug in the Amazon, has suffered the hardest. The country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, will be remembered as the region’s pantomime villain for playing down the virus as it ripped through the country. Over 5.5 million cases of the coronavirus — the third highest tally in the world — and 165,000 deaths have been recorded there.

But Brazil is not such an exception in South America. From Argentina to Colombia, despite most countries locking down swiftly and strictly, success stories are few. Of countries populated by more than 25 million people, five of the world’s ten highest Covid-19 death rates per capita are in South America.

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More than six months of lockdowns have destroyed livelihoods and businesses and caused a spike in domestic violence and depression. The economic fallout threatens to reverse a decade of fighting poverty and widen the chasm between the haves and have-nots in the world’s most unequal region.

But the lockdowns have also failed to contain the virus’ spread.

Cases and deaths remain persistently high across South America and are now appearing in many previously unaffected regions.

Argentina, which has endured the longest lockdown in the world, became the smallest country to record over a million cases of the coronavirus on October 20. It has since recorded another 300,000 cases. Colombia joined the undesirable club five days later, and Peru is likely to follow soon.

While proponents and critics of lockdowns alike cherry pick figures from Sweden and across Europe to craft their arguments, Latin America offers perhaps the starkest lesson: lockdowns are not only devastating to economies and lives, but used alone, they are an ineffective tool.

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On March 20, three days after the UK entered a national lockdown — and two weeks after Colombia diagnosed its first case of the coronavirus — Colombia’s president, Ivan Duque, ordered all residents to stay at home except for essential activities such as grocery shopping and medical attention. Schools, borders and public events had already been closed.

As Italy’s ICU units began collapsing under the strain of Covid-19 patients, the decision to enforce lockdowns swiftly and strictly was mirrored across most of South America. Fears — later borne out — were that if Europe’s healthcare systems could not cope with the influx, South America’s frail, underfunded hospitals stood little chance.

The region’s population is the world’s most urban (around 80% of people live in cities) and the most unequal. Around a third of people live in poverty — many of whom reside in sprawling slums where regular running water and soap are lacking. Healthcare systems are typical of developing economies, while people have the health profile of a developed one: heart disease, obesity and other comorbidities which make Covid-19 particularly deadly, are rife.

Swift action bought the region the vital time it needed to ramp up its hospitals. Overnight Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, was emptied of its usual chaos. Roads full of buses recklessly vying for precious tarmac suddenly became orderly and pavements fought over by food vendors, street hawkers, pedestrians, and cyclists became vacant.

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“It was like one of those films in the Wild West with the balls of tumbleweed rolling through the streets,” says Gloria Zuluaga, a 52-year-old restaurant owner. Zuluaga was concerned by the closure of her restaurant but relieved by the trickle of daily Covid-19 cases as Colombians retreated to their homes, rather than the flood in Europe. But alarm bells were soon ringing elsewhere.

In neighbouring Peru, the number of Covid-19 cases were rising steadily despite similar measures being implemented. By May daily deaths had reached triple figures. As less than half of households own a refrigerator, many Peruvians had to shop daily in markets which quickly became breeding grounds for the virus.

In April, South America looked on in horror as families in Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, laid the bodies of their loved ones in the streets. The city’s morgues, hospitals and large refrigerators had already been filled. The surge in cases was an early warning that the continent’s poverty and large informal economies would undermine lockdowns.

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“It was the best evidence-based thing to do at the moment,” says Diego Rosselli, an epidemiologist at Bogota’s Javeriana University who has consulted the Colombian government on managing the pandemic. “But I think we would have been thinking differently if we had known what we know right now.”

Rosselli now advocates enforcing the use of facemasks in all public places and a nightly curfew rather than trying to prevent people from working in the day. Unlike in Europe, the majority of South Americans work in informal jobs such as cleaning houses or selling snacks on the street. They had to make a tough choice: go out and risk contracting the disease, or go hungry.

“We’ve been inside for three months. We’re all terrified of going outside and catching the virus but eventually I had to go back to work”, said Luis Carlos Diaz, a 35-year-old taxi driver and father of two young girls. Diaz was forced to resume driving for Uber in early June despite a surge in cases. He had handled the onset of alcoholism under house confinement but could not stop his savings being burnt up.

Governments did offer economic support but it came too late or not at all.

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“They said they are helping people but I don’t know who, because they aren’t helping around here,” says Diana Rodriguez, a 47-year-old mother of two who broke quarantine after two months to resume cleaning houses for £10 a day.

The Panamerican Health Organisation (PAHO), the WHO’s branch for the Americas, believes a lack of financial security was central to lockdowns being broken. “PAHO has urged governments to ensure that public health measures are accompanied by social protection measures so that people do not have to choose between their lives and their livelihoods,” says Dr Jarbas Barbossa, the organisation’s assistant director.

As early as March, the economic pain caused by the pandemic sparked protests and looting protests and looting in Bogotá. But the biggest failure was misusing lockdowns indefinitely as a tool to fight the virus rather than to buy time to draw up a wider, more sustainable strategy, say experts.

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“A lockdown is only meant to buy time for the health system to ramp up testing and tracing efforts. Certainly to clear out space in hospitals for intensive care units in particular, and to prepare public health guidelines and information campaigns or mask mandates, distancing suggestions, if not requirements,” says Michael Touchton at the University of Miami’s Covid-19 Policy Observatory for Latin America.

Lockdowns did allow South American countries to ramp up their intensive care capacity. Colombia’s ICU capacity was up 40% on March by August.

President Duque and PAHO have pointed to the country’s relatively low Covid-19 mortality rate of 3% to illustrate the success of lockdowns. It is less than half of Bolivia’s 6.1% and Ecuador’s 7.8%, where healthcare systems collapsed.

There was no plan, however, to come out the other side once hospitals had weathered the initial storm, say observers. “Lockdowns have been wasted because they haven’t been accompanied with sensible reopening measures,” Touchton says.

Colombia eventually relaxed restrictions such as restaurant and airport closures in September because of economic pressure. There was a brief respite from August’s peak of 13,000 daily cases but they did not drop below 5,000 and are rising steadily once again.

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Across the continent, Argentina, hailed not long ago a regional benchmark for keeping infection rates low into the summer, is a grim example of why lockdown-reliance is dangerous.

“We were lecturing the whole world: ‘Argentina is doing great, Argentina is better than Sweden, it’s better than Uruguay, it’s better than Chile, it’s better than any other country in the world’ …. And now we are paying the price because we are the worst in the class,” says Adolfo Rubinstein, the country’s former Health Minister.

Argentina has recorded 1.3 million coronavirus cases and is reporting around 12,000 a day, more per million people than anywhere else in the Americas.

Like Colombia, mobility data illustrates why lockdowns failed to stem the virus’ propagation there. Activity plummeted in March when lockdowns began but slowly crept up and accelerated quickly around the two-month mark as people ran out of money and fatigue set in.

“It’s out of control; nobody is respecting the restrictions,” Rubinstein says.

Argentina’s government began relaxing lockdown in July when shops reopened and adults were permitted to exercise outside.

“Considering the final results and the situation we are facing now I would say that lockdown didn’t work,” says Rubinstein. The government’s “sin” was not that they implemented lockdowns but that they then “fell in love with them” and did not pursue a wider strategy, like tracing and isolating cases.

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Argentina is stuggling to test at the same rate as the virus spreads. The country’s testing fell behind in March when global supplies bottlenecked, Rubinstein says, leaving it stuck in a perpetual loop where it cannot test sufficiently and therefore cannot localise and manage cases regionally, leaving national lockdowns the only option.

The only South American country that has proven capable of keeping the virus under control is Uruguay, where 4,000 cases have been recorded in its three million population. Though Uruguay is wealthier and better-equipped, scientists attribute the success to quickly breaking transmission chains through swift and widespread testing while keeping the public well-informed. Though borders and places where large numbers of people could gather were closed the public were not ordered to stay at home.

Argentina and the rest of South America have not been as successful. With the virus’ spread seemingly out of control there is no obvious remedy.

The economic and psychological damage from the first wave of cases was high: The World Bank predicts a contraction of 7.2% this year, more than any other region. Now the second wave is coming governments may have played all of their lockdown cards too early, leaving little recourse. “There’s no appetite for another lockdown, for economic reasons, for psychological reasons, and for political reasons,” says Touchton. “Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a rise in cases until there’s a vaccine.”

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Though Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia have secured access to a potential vaccine  under an international agreement it will arrive next year at the earliest. Administering it to diverse populations spread across vast areas will be challenging. Rubinstein fears things may get much worse in Argentina, with nightmarish scenes like those seen in Brazil, before they can get better.

“If there is an increase in deaths or the collapse of the healthcare system then people will probably make themselves more aware and shelter at home, but otherwise nobody’s complying,” he says.

If there is some cause for optimism, it’s not in ordering people to stay at home again, but in the weather, and lessons learnt elsewhere, Touchton says.

Summer arrives in time for Christmas in South America and should entice Argentinians, Brazilians and Peruvians outside, reducing the risk of virus transmission.

Informing the public clearly on how to make the most of the weather safely with face masks and social distancing while preventing “super-spreader” events could be the type of sustainable middle ground that has reaped success elsewhere. And it may save lives.