David Brooks:
Right. A lot of them beforehand were like, well, Columbia made a deal, maybe that’s right for us. Once Harvard came out, I talked to a couple of university presidents who said, oh, this is where we need to be, because the Trump administration made it impossible for Harvard not to say no.
And that’s what we’re dealing with here. And so the point I tried to make is, all these different sectors have to get together and inform one big civic movement. And it can’t be political. It’s not Democrats versus Republicans. It’s not left versus right. It’s institutions versus the destruction of our institutions of civilization.
And if you look down through history, there have been social movements, these kinds of civic uprising that have succeeded. They have banded together across sectors. They have a clear, simple message that appeals to a lot of different people. They use things like lawsuits, protests, boycotts, all sorts of things, strikes, anything they can do.
But, basically, if you’re head of a law firm or a university, any of these institutions, you’re dealing with administrations, it’s just about raw power. So the question you have to ask yourself is, how do we amass power so they’re not dividing us, so we’re dividing them? And that is a mass uprising.
And the one turning point, if you look even at the civil rights movement, when you do a nonviolent protest and the people on the other side attack you with violence, that tends to weaken them. And then suddenly you’re dividing them, some, obviously.
And so this is the kind of way we have to think, that it’s time not just to think, well, maybe he will look at the other guy. It’s time we’re all involved, we’re all in this together, and we’re going to amass power together.
