One of the arguments you hear from defenders of the current sit-ins and encampments at colleges such as Columbia and UCLA is that they are reviving tactics that were used justly and successfully in the civil-rights movement, the protests against the Vietnam war, and the anti-apartheid movement. There’s a lot wrong with this picture. First, the underlying pro-Hamas, anti-Israel cause here is entirely unjust, and its specific demands (for university divestment from businesses only tenuously connected to Israel) are both ridiculous and themselves unjust. Second, the protest movements of the past were not always successful. As Jonah Goldberg reminded CNN viewers, the lawless campus protests of 1968 backfired by helping Richard Nixon get elected and pursue the Vietnam War for five more years:

The anti-apartheid protests were more successful in getting colleges to divest from South Africa, but it was only the collapse of Soviet activity in southern Africa at the end of the Cold War that made the end of apartheid possible.

Third, specifically as to tactics, it is a bait and switch to lump the civil-rights movement in with the other two. That movement was a large one featuring a lot of different tactics, some more defensible than others, but it should be noted that the most effective forms of civil disobedience were either passively provoking police overreactions to efforts to vindicate the law (i.e., the Selma marches to register voters, which protesters had a right to do under the 15th Amendment), or highly targeted tactics aimed at particular injustices and their direct perpetrators. These included lunch-counter sit-ins targeting businesses that wouldn’t serve black customers and the Montgomery bus boycott aimed at the bus company discriminating against black riders. Occupying campus buildings, forcing schools to cancel classes, vandalizing private property, and harassing Jews were not effective pieces of the civil-rights movement’s arsenal. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the one who became famous for standing in a schoolhouse door.

That’s partly for the same reasons as given in my recent argument about the tactics of the Right: How you fight depends on whom your movement consists of and what its aims are. The heart and soul of the civil-rights movement were churchgoing, working-class black families. Sure, the movement attracted left-wing radicals, Communists, black nationalists, and a whole bunch of other types of supporters — including a lot of northern Jewish liberals — but the movement’s roots were in the black Christian church, and its marches were often filled with men in suits and women in their Sunday best. They weren’t hippies. They didn’t want to burn down the system — they wanted to share in it.