Article content continued

The so-called ‘popular revolt’ was just the usual misfits and goons seizing a pretext to vandalize shop windows

Captains of industry and titans of finance have rebelled against this, not by impugning the right of the legal cartel to use its control of legislatures to produce herniating masses of new laws and regulations that lawyers must argue about in courts presided over by lawyers elevated to the bench, but by trying to qualify business as an academic subject, and dispensing billions of dollars of their shareholders’ and their own money to propagate the myth. It isn’t; it is experience and intuition, and almost none of the world’s great people of commerce learned about business academically. They learned by doing it and becoming bigger and richer and smarter as they grew.

At this point, persevering readers may be wondering what this has to do with the U.S. election, the subject I opened with: the reaction of many American universities to the presidential election was enough to discourage the most ardent adherent to the fairy tale of the pristine impartiality and fearless pursuit of wisdom of America’s vast and hideously expensive academia. The U.S. election went off without incident on the day: there were no charges of stuffed or vanished ballot boxes, (unlike 1960; the voting boxes for some of Nixon’s districts in prosperous North Chicago are still missing), or of false voting lists. Only 52 per cent of eligible voters voted, indicating a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, but there were no contested results or objectionable incidents at the country’s approximately 100,000 polling places.

Nonetheless, academia fluttered concernedly. The Dean of Williams College offered, as my friend Roger Kimball of the New Criterion called it, a post-electoral “emetic” to her campus community: “Many (students and faculty) are feeling acutely upset, overwhelmed, and frightened this morning. Please take this opportunity to reach out to your classmates, to offer support, to be open to discussion, to be ready to listen, and to remind everyone you see on campus that our community stands ready to support all of us.” This wasn’t reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or 9/11, it was the aftermath of a completely orderly American presidential election, for the 54th consecutive time.

The administration of Cornell University held a “cry-in” after Trump’s victory, and furnished materials so students could express their emotions.

The director of the LBGTQ Center at Princeton (the university of James Madison, chief author of the U.S. Constitution, and of Woodrow Wilson, and where Albert Einstein was a faculty member), put it out to her community, “I know that many of us may be feeling shock, confusion, fear.… (We) are here for you as you process.… All emotions you may be having now are valid,” presumably including that of the majority of American voters, including the Libertarians: the satisfaction that the country was about to see the last of the Clintons, Obamas, and Bushes as major public figures, unless Chelsea Clinton or the (very ingenuous) Obama daughters, or a young Bush rise through the ranks and become president as the latter Adams and Roosevelt did, a generation after their presidential relatives. Those were meritocratic dynasties, not cartels passing the greatest offices in the United States around among themselves as we have seen in the last 30 years.