Sometimes, the spirit of the nation suddenly changes. What had suited it before, what it had thought before, is over. They turn a corner. In his tribute of love to his people and the gifts they brought the world, The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill shows how this assent of the people was a mighty force in the development of constitutional freedom. In doing so, he consciously teaches that republican democracy can rely on such deep awakenings of the people’s will at times of crisis. Trump was overthrown and is suffering a prosecution almost as political and disrespectful of the law as was King Charles’. The English Civil War turned on these awakenings. The nascent constitution was put under terrible stress as first the king and then his opponents broke the constitutional consensus and sought to consolidate their own control of the realm. The king asserted his right to rule Britain without Parliament. The people were at first not bothered, as it seemed a quarrel among politicians. But as Charles made misstep after misstep, attempting to foist unpopular taxes and to make religious changes, he gradually lost the heart of his people. When the king allowed enforcement of an old statute fining people who did not attend church, it had seemed a good idea — religious uniformity under his church and a new revenue stream. The people thought otherwise, and it became a defining moment. Churchill writes: Now all over England men and women found themselves haled before justices for not attending church and fined one shilling a time. Here indeed was something ordinary men and women could understand. This was no question for lawyers and judges in the court of the Exchequer; it was something new and teasing … The Parliamentary agitation which had been conducted during all these years with so much difficulty gained a widespread accession of strength. So many of the issues that exercise think tanks and the chattering classes don’t mean much to those who are not professionally political. Most people feel the most important things are their homes and families and their jobs, and the local issues of their communities. They wish to be free to be political only in ways that reflect the sense and logic of their lives and ignore as best they can the attempts to recruit them to some simplistic but all-involving ideology. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: It’s Final: Biden Has Chosen to Support Hamas) But when the politics forces its way into their lives in a way they can no longer ignore, they do get involved, then and now. That is what the first King Charles had awakened. His fortunes were to spiral down, until the mobs on the street combined with Charles’ enemies in Parliament forced him to agree to the execution of his closest friend and ally as a traitor. And at that low point, the mood of the people slowly began to turn again, with a natural sympathy beginning to show for the king in the face of his doctrinaire, implacable enemies. But the will of the people for peace was no match for the doctrinaire hatreds that now could find resolution only in war. Britain was convulsed with civil war from 1642 until 1649, when Cromwell took over as military dictator, had the king executed in a show trial, and ruled until 1658. Cromwell had killed the king, dissolved the nobility’s political power, and eventually sent even the House of Commons packing. But on his death, his successors saw that Parliament would have to be called back — they had no control over the people. And then over the next year, the mood of the people swung around hard. Soon, all the supporters of King Charles who had been expelled from Parliament during the Civil War were recalled. Now Churchill cites diarist Samuel Pepys’ account of the night the Parliament was restored to the royalists. In the City of London, which had led the revolt against the king in 1642, Pepys saw “from one end to the other with a glory about it, so high was the light of the bonfires and so thick round the city and the bells rang everywhere.” A popular song of the day expressed the mood of the people, something Churchill would point out on many occasions. Some of its lyrics went: Then will I wait, till the waters abate, Which now disturb my troubled brain: Else never rejoice till I hear the voice That the King enjoys his own again. The son of the decapitated king now was called to return from exile and be crowned as King Charles II. Of his triumphal welcome back, Churchill writes: All classes crowded to welcome the King home to his own. They cheered and wept in uncontrollable emotion. They felt themselves delivered from a nightmare. They dreamed they had now entered a Golden Age. The king was back, but not as an absolute autocrat; Parliament was re-established but had to respect the powers the king found he could still assert, such as dissolving or recessing Parliament as he willed or keeping it in session as he might choose. The clearest winner was the unwritten Constitution, and the people who defended it and were loyal to it, even when it was eclipsed by ideological struggle. (READ MORE: Chamberlain and Biden: Appeasement Then and Now) The people were to find it was no Golden Age only gradually. In the meantime, they were distracted by the relaxing of the strict Puritan code of virtues that had held in Cromwell’s day. Eventually, Charles II died and his brother took the throne as James II. James had become a Catholic and that brought back bad memories of the last Catholic monarch, Mary, who had conducted a religious war and consigned Protestants to the flames. The people had long ago rejected Mary and Catholicism and considered the matter settled. Yet their innate peacefulness gave the king a sense that he could do as he wished, and step after step, he made every indication of replacing all the most important people in the kingdom with Catholics. He expanded his army, seeming to ready himself to impose his religion on the people by force. This caused the mood to suddenly turn foreboding. This time, there was no extended civil war. From May of 1688, when the king ordered a declaration of powers he was assuming to be read in all churches, it took only a few months. By the end of November, revolt broke out all over the country. Churchill writes: “City after city rose in rebellion. By one spontaneous, tremendous convulsion the English nation repudiated James.” By mid-December, James had fled to France, never to return, ending what is called the Glorious Revolution, glorious for its swiftness, finality, and lack of bloodshed. Churchill was setting out for us how the people bore forward their constitution and how they assert their self-governance. They want restraint and moderation in government and practice it themselves. This means that they often allow leaders a chance to show who they are, rather than constantly inserting themselves into the leadership struggle. But there comes a reckoning eventually, and the people will not be denied. The chaos of the Trump first term repelled many people, who could not imagine the degree to which a government they had believed trustworthy had abused its trust and lied again and again and again. The coordinated undermining of the justice system may well have been the last straw. The people have not been blind to Trump’s sins, but now there is a sense growing every day that they are nothing compared to the betrayal of the people’s trust and faith that has been the staple of those trying to destroy him. Churchill wrote of the change in the people as Cromwell had him put to death: A strange destiny had engulfed the King of England. None had resisted with more untimely stubbornness the movement of his age. He had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all we now call our Parliamentary liberties. Yet as misfortunes crowded upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England. The people were the people, not to be reduced to one political movement. The king who had broken faith with them had regained it by nobly suffering a terrible and deadly persecution. The people restored the kingdom and put his son back on the throne. Trump was overthrown and is suffering a prosecution almost as political and disrespectful of the law as was King Charles’. He, too, is seeing a change in the hearts of the people. (READ MORE: The Bible Calls Us to Courage and Freedom) A change in the breeze is coming again. Always, in the end, it will strengthen the will and the power of the people to live free under the constitution they have ordained. The post Trump and the Glorious Revolution appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Last week, Minouche Shafik, the president and ostensibly the leader of Columbia University but of late not famous for showing actual leadership, wrote an op-ed entitled “Universities must engage in serious soul searching on protests.”  As if to remind us just how out of touch she is, the piece was published in the Financial Times — a great newspaper (it better be since they want $900 a year to subscribe) but not an American one and not one with wide readership in the only nation that matters in this conversation. But then, I’m sure Minouche views herself as “a citizen of the world.” Relying on a “common good” standard … is a cheap way of sounding as if you stand for all that’s good and true. She touches on all the platitudes of the day: “free speech,” “activism,” “dialogue,” “enabling conversations,” “bring(ing) a multitude of perspectives together,” “rebuild(ing) the bonds within ourselves,” “shared values,” etc. I mean, if you had a bingo game of the mind-numbing word salad of academy-speak, everybody would have won. (READ MORE from Ross Kaminsky: Dumping the Term ‘Bidenomics’ Isn’t Enough for Joe) One other topic that Ms. Shafik must find of paramount importance (because it emerges in her first sentence) deserves a deep dive. I quote that sentence in full: “When I was inaugurated as Columbia’s 20th president on October 4, 2023, I called for strengthening the bond between universities and society through a recommitment to academia’s contribution to the common good.” Paraphrasing the wisdom of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that phrase (“the common good”) means what she thinks it means.  The fatal conceit of believing that one knows what the “common good” comprises (much less, as Hayek explained, that one can “shape the world around him according to his wishes”) is far more prevalent on the left; conservatives are not immune to it but the intellectual narcissism involved in such pronouncements is typically found in the Democratic caucuses in Congress, among leaders of major left-leaning foundations and think-tanks, on the editorial pages of most big-city newspapers and, of course, in the offices of college and university administrators. But beyond clean air and water, avoiding nuclear war, and rooting against the Oakland Las Vegas Raiders, there cannot be such a thing as a common good because there is not, and will not be, near-universal agreement as to what is good. Indeed, if there is anything that recent protests should demonstrate to someone whose life has been as impacted by them as Ms. Shafik’s has, it’s that there is no such “common good” agreement on almost any major subject of the day. I’ll run a few issues by you. Ask yourself, “Do I think I know what’s truly ‘good’ here?” and “Am I confident that almost everybody else agrees with me?” Honest people will find many confident “yes” answers to the first and a dominance of “no”s to the second. Abortion Aiding Ukraine Raising (or lowering) income taxes “Canceling” student debt Who should win the next presidential election Expanding Medicare Increasing education about African-Americans in K-12 education if it means less teaching about others whose achievements may have been more important Each of these questions — and endless more you might think of — goes beyond just politics or policy. For most people these questions have significant moral content or implications for fundamental principles and worldviews. So what is to be claimed about the “common good” on such issues … on almost all issues? The only honest answer is “there isn’t one.” And since there isn’t one, what does it mean that the president of one of the world’s most elite educational establishments believes there is, and further that it is her job to promote it?  I very much doubt that Ms. Shafik’s conception of “the common good” is limited to clean air and avoiding a nuclear winter. Perhaps she believes more gauzy ideas like “talking instead of fighting to work out problems” fall into the “common good” category. But even if true that seems an exceedingly narrow mission for the highest of higher education. Still, I doubt that’s what she means.  She means what too many professors and most 20-year-old students with Guiness-World-Record levels of strong-opinions-not-justified-by-knowledge-or-experience mean: What I think is good IS good, it is our role to make you agree, and (intellectual) beatings will continue until morale improves.  I understand that university students, especially at the “best” schools, have always suffered this conceit. It’s as common a part of growing up as getting acne. And while administrators and deans want to support, even encourage, certain levels of societal awareness and activism among students, in the past there has typically been a bit of adult supervision on campus. But not lately.  Just as too many parents have wanted to be their kids’ friends rather than boundary-makers and worthy role models, even though kids desperately need both of those things, Minouche and other (mostly female) university presidents seem afraid of their charges, looking to nonsensical appeals to the “common good” to assuage the madding crowd of petulant teens and 20-somethings.  What kind of university creates a creature that spends a couple hundred thousand bucks to study “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination” and then demands that the university let GrubHub cater her takeover of a university building lest the poor darlings inside (who could just walk out) starve to death? (READ MORE: Voters Care About Threats to Democracy … But Not Today) What kind of university president is afraid of that creature? Not only does Ms. King-Slutzky (her real name) not know what a “common good” is; she manifestly does not care. So even by Minouche’s own stated goal, Columbia has failed. That’s partly because Columbia has always promoted students like our little Marxist snowflake but also because Columbia, like most other of the “best” schools, has for decades had the wrong goal.  It’s important to distinguish the “common good” from the institution’s values. For example, just because some subset of Americans might not value (and some might not even benefit from) deep study of the “great books” of human history (a key part of Columbia’s “core curriculum”) — and therefore it’s not properly considered a common good — a university can and should say “this is a fundamental principle of this institution and you will abide by it or leave.” It need not be a global common good; it just needs to be important to that institution and understood by all who might attend, donate to, or work for such a place.  Relying on a “common good” standard which eliminates almost everything when choosing what your organization stands for is a cheap way of sounding as if you stand for all that’s good and true in the world when actually you stand for nothing.  President Shafik and others in similar positions must refocus. Turn away from ethereal nonsense fueled by egotism and virtue signaling, away from the non-existent “common good” as they conceive it, and toward their own clearly stated values and the sole true “common good” at an institution of higher education: for the teachers to teach, and the students to learn.  The post Universities and the ‘Common Good’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The problem with British history, said Salman Rushdie, is that so much of it happened abroad. By way of revision, we might say that the problem with American politics today is that all of it is happening abroad. University campuses across the continental breadth of the United States have become vicarious cockpits for an intractable Levantine conflict raging half a world away while the President himself increasingly resembles Ceaușescu on the balcony, waving with the twilit tranquility of advanced senescence at a country split by the fissure which the Israel/Hamas war and its ancillary domestic student revolts have carved into America’s political topography. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain could breezily dismiss the looming Czech crisis as a “quarrel in a faraway country between people of which we know nothing.” In 2024, the most fateful American presidential election in a generation may yet be decided by the optics of a faraway quarrel of which we now hear little else. It goes without saying that a revolution that can be jeopardized by the strategic deployment of herbaceous fruits is no revolution at all. It might be countered from the outset that America has, sort of, been here before: most obviously, the moral bifurcation over Vietnam. And with regard to the students, it might likewise fairly be asked: What’s new? The iconography of the 1960s has accustomed us to the notion that campuses have always been a playroom for pseudo-revolutionaries who never get past their larval stage. But we were always able to console ourselves with the not unrealistic expectation that they would, and often did, Grow Out Of It. Which is to say, there were always enough adult opinions in the room to put a check on the fever and act as an antiviral once the malady escaped from campus and entered the temperate authenticity of the real world. (READ MORE from Phillip Mark McGough: Haiti Will End in Blood. It Is Better Left Alone.) This time round however the real world — by which if we mean anything we mean the world of adult opinion and adult responsibilities, the consensus reality of common sense — no longer exists. The left’s long march through the institutions, commenced by that self-same radicalism of the 1960s and abetted en route by unprecedented demographical change, has reached its terminus and planted its flag: well might the left weep, for there are no more worlds left to conquer. Students now leave the mock-Marxist ecology of campus to enter the mock-Marxist ecology of an utterly transformed America, to consume the output of the mock-Marxist media and mouth the mock-Marxist mantras of corporate HR departments, to peer through an Overton Window which has defaulted so far to the left that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (trivial, a professional nuisance, but impeccably anti-Zionist) is harassed on the streets for her lack of pro-Hamas zeal. Put plainly, the same student we laugh at today for demanding gluten-free food for the protestors at UCLA will one day be a personnel manager determining which intersectional violation you’ve committed and whether or not you get to keep your job. Tomorrow belongs to me, sings the golden-haired, wintry-eyed Aryan boy at the end of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. But both today and tomorrow belong to the students of Columbia, of NYU, of USC, of UCLA. With the near-full-spectrum victory of the left in the cultural sphere these past 30 years, the real world itself has become one vast, vandalised, grievance-addled, graffiti-blemished, thoroughly unserious tent-strewn college campus. All politics is now student politics. If any measure of satisfaction is to be sought and found in this unmade bed of woe, it’s in the panicked response of the university administrators, who find themselves in a ditch dug deep by their own labors. It used to be said that all revolutions devour their own children; of the campus revolts, it might more accurately be said that the revolution is devouring its parents. These are the same universities, after all, whose professors and administrators celebrated when BLM torched the inner cities in 2020, the same universities whose tenured mandarins rested their chins on steepled fingers and debated the validity of abolishing the same police forces which they now summons in full battle dress to clear out the encampments. Student radicalism, indeed, has hitherto been a marketing strategy for universities which explicitly sell themselves to the public as Marxist madrasas: NYU for example literally promises students via its website “a world of activism opportunities”; Columbia’s website meanwhile reminisces with revolutionary nostalgia, though with no apparent sense of embarrassment, about the more than 1,000 students protesting the Vietnam War who had to be forcibly removed by police from the Morningside campus in 1968. These are the universities in other words which cheered when events met their own ideological ends, in the process divesting themselves of any claim to academic integrity. Transgressive behavior, garlanded as “social justice,” was greenlit, encouraged, and valorized. The BLM summer of 2020 and its concomitant violence was of utility to academia because it perpetuated, rather than challenged, long-established culturally Marxist power structures. Many students, inevitably not as au courant as their professors when it comes to unpicking the cat’s cradle of contradictions which undergirds these things, are therefore understandably puzzled as to why the universities thought it permissible and commendable for entire ghettoes to burn in 2020 while in 2024 a collection of tents on a neglected lawn are sufficient justification for police brutality. This is the predictable chaos when ideology runs ahead of its master, when the puppet becomes a real boy and begins to tug on the strings. All this is not to attribute any degree of logic, consistency, or even sincerely-held moral seriousness to the students themselves. Performative extremism, what the philosopher Sidney Hook called “ritualistic liberalism,” refracted via the lens of social media, has become the blight of our century, bringing to mind the social critic Max Nordau’s diagnosis of the two sure signs of civilizational degradation: mania and mysticism. By mania he meant a retreat into coddled self-absorption, a morbid preoccupation with one’s own inner emotional life and its ceaseless projection into the external world, and by mysticism the seeking of salvation in a new revelatory gnosis, a transformative vision which not only sidesteps reality but supplants it altogether in the mind of the believer. We think of the unrelenting succession of half-real, half-fabulous moral panics, like the witch crazes of old Europe, which have bludgeoned our senses these past few years alone: BLM, the “unconscious racism” which only “racism experts” can scry, COVID apocalypticism, gender dysphoria, the Russian menace, latterly Gaza. Freud’s “Reality Principle” has crumbled. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the campus protests, for all their heat and noise, still feel oddly tepid, somehow unreal and depthless, long-distance transmissions from a cold, dead star. To be sure, the students are responding to real events, but the response itself is hyperreal (the cultural-technological process by which reality mimics and magnifies itself), the spectacle overshadowed by meta-spectacle, the phenomenon by epiphenomena. In The Dean’s December (incidentally a novel about an academic falling foul of the self-appointed campus ideological police) Saul Bellow mused over what he called the “great modern mystery …why, in this age of communication, are we so near the border of total incoherency.” Elsewhere in the same novel he refers to “event-glamour,” whereby “the false representations of communication led to horrible distortions of public consciousness.” And Bellow wrote all this in 1982, though he might just as well have been writing with the gravity of a prophet about the series of mimetic events, replicated exponentially by social media, which has defined the period 2020 – 2024. And it is difficult, is it not, to see the heraldry and liturgy of the students — the keffiyehs, the martyrs’ frowns, the demands for global intifada alongside demands for vegan food — and not at the same time see that there is something utterly fantastic about it, something which sits as a weary hyphen between tragedy and comedy. One example from many: At UCLA, acting on rumors that one of the pro-Palestinian protestors had a potentially fatal banana allergy, pro-Israel protestors promptly discovered a new frontier in biological warfare by wielding bananas en masse. It goes without saying that a revolution that can be jeopardized by the strategic deployment of herbaceous fruits is no revolution at all, and its foot soldiers no revolutionaries. (READ MORE: Joe Biden’s Tragic Invulnerability) Henceforth and for the foreseeable future we can expect American politics to remain febrile with this disorder, this pollution of domestic discourse by far-off sorrows in the more fissile places of the world. As in a political manifestation of quantum entanglement, the moment violence erupts in the Middle East so we can be sure it will erupt on American campuses and rage beyond to engulf the nation in a fresh round of hashtaggable misery, until the news cycle turns to the next meta-event with its totalitarian demands on our time and attention. It is a deeply unhealthy way to live. We are in an age of synthetic sentiment, spearheaded by children, but nonetheless dangerous for all that. The beginning of wisdom here is perhaps to be found in a cautionary dictum from Robert Louis Stevenson, namely, that the sentimentalist always prepares the pathway for the brute. The post Event Glamour: The Students Revolt appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Press For Truth:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review: It is extremely difficult to discern what might be the thinking behind the clueless President Joe Biden and his Blinken-Austin-Mayorkas foreign-policy-plus national security team. Or rather, the problem is that there does not appear to be any thinking about it at all if one measures it by what benefits […]