Columbia crisis: Another massive failure of liberalism

Americans of all stripes across the political spectrum have been understandably transfixed by the wave of student protests against the Gaza war that has spread from elite Ivy League campuses to numerous other schools, some more surprising than others. I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis — and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others — by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans’ witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. It’s also worth noting that America’s extraordinary narcissism — another quality shared across the political spectrum — creates a global distortion effect whereby the deaths of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world are transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. America’s extraordinary narcissism creates a global distortion effect whereby the massacre of at least 34,000 people in a conflict on the other side of the world is transformed into a domestic political and cultural crisis. Longtime British politician and diplomat Chris Patten, a pillar of center-right establishment thinking, told Kristof that Biden had made “a terrible, terrible error” that fed into “Chinese and Russian narratives that the West employs double standards and doesn’t really care about principles.” I would describe Biden’s predicament as a symptom of the moral and political failures of liberalism, as well as the peculiar status of the United States, a still-dominant global superpower now in irreversible decline.