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…
