The Morning Reading List

Some articles of note to start your week, from our virtual newsstand

It’s a travel week for me, so I will likely not have many original pieces going up this week, but you never know. In the meantime, several articles caught my eye over the weekend and worth noting today:

• Robert P. George of Princeton reflected on “The Error of Old School Liberals” a few months back, but worth re-reading just now as colleges and universities finally face an overdue reckoning for decades of relentless surrender to the left. Sample:

There is certainly truth in the idea that woke ideology is betrayal of liberal values, but it’s not the whole story. Getting at the whole story will require old-school liberals to engage in some serious, self-critical reflection — because there are respects in which they themselves, through the decisions they made and the causes they embraced, bear responsibility for our cultural woes.

The truth is that the old-school liberals planted — and to a significant degree nurtured — the seeds of the plant whose manifest toxicity rightly distresses them today. How? Well, in the 1960s, old-school liberals made what was, in my view, a grave mistake: They completely bought into the ideology that the late sociologist Robert Bellah labeled “expressive individualism.”

I think Robbie is too nice to the liberals in this piece (but Robbie is a very nice guy), but this analysis of the substance of liberalism’s weakness is spot on.

Chaser—Bret Stephens in a New York Times roundtable:

I’d say the lowest-quality institutions created since the 1990s have names like Columbia and Berkeley — these are essentially factories of Maoist cadres taught by professors whose political views ranged almost exclusively from the left to the far left.

• Over at Civitas, Helen Dale writes well on the situation in Britain.

• The New York Times is turning cartwheels trying to erase its own history of biased reporting on everything from COVID to higher education and wokery. But this story deserves special merit:

Working at Anheuser-Busch, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement

By Anson Frericks

I still remember the day I realized Anheuser-Busch InBev was no longer the company I thought it was.

I had crunched the numbers and believed the company could make millions of dollars if we agreed to distribute canned coffees made by Black Rifle Coffee Company. I knew Black Rifle’s pro-military and pro-law-enforcement messaging could ruffle some progressive feathers — the company vowed to hire 10,000 veterans after Starbucks announced it would hire 10,000 refugees — but I also knew many of our drinkers shared those values and had grown fed up with the way Starbucks and other coffee companies seemed to cater to coastal, latte-loving elites.

The proposal was rejected. It was early 2022, two years after the George Floyd protests, and I was told that being associated with Black Rifle was too politically provocative, especially in progressive circles.

• John Yoo and I have been having a lively debate on the Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast about Trump’s foreign policy and whether U.S. foreign policy has been too Wilsonian or insufficiently “realist.” It matters because of Trump’s controversial moves over Ukraine. So I perked up upon seeing the great Edward Luttwak, over at UnHerd, suggesting that Trump is pulling a reverse Nixon:

While the immediate rationale behind the humiliation of Zelensky in the White House would have been to soften-up Russia and obtain a prompt ceasefire, and start negotiations for a territorial compromise, it was all done in the service of Trump’s larger and longer term ambition of neutralising China. In this, he is pulling off a “reverse Nixon”: instead of courting China to oppose the USSR, as Kissinger and Nixon did in 1972, Trump wants to detach Moscow from Beijing.

(And in case you noticed, yes—the McDonald’s arches in the background of the photo above was not a coincidence!)