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. Police have been called in to break up student encampments not just at Columbia University’s iconic Manhattan campus, which was both ground zero and a natural media target, but at USC in Los Angeles (once upon a time a famously white-bread conservative school), Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State, Indiana University and Cal Poly Humboldt in rural Northern California, among other places.

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. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didn’t save her job anyway.

First of all, it’s more accurate to say that the media-consuming public is riveted by the contentious political drama surrounding those scenes of campus discord than by the protests themselves, which are a striking sign of the times but hardly a brand new phenomenon. My own college graduation, in the mid-1980s, was disrupted by a student walkout over the university’s involvement in nuclear weapons research and its non-divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Strident moral positions and overheated rhetoric are features of student activism, which is sometimes effective and at other times purely symbolic; every generation, it’s fair to say, inherits or creates its own iteration.

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. Nobody actually dies in this domestic crisis, but everyone feels injured: Public discourse is boiled down to idiotic clichés and identity politics is reduced to its dumbest possible self-caricature. When the apparent issues are about who has said the most hateful things, who feels more “unsafe” and in what context, and which political party can get away with twisting events to suit its preferred narrative, then we’re stuck in the TikTok reboot of Plato’s cave, staring at flickering shadows long since severed from reality.

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None of that is the student protesters’ fault, exactly, although they have played an........

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