4/2/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Daniel J. Mahoney’s piece at The American Mind on the controversial topic of nationalism. He writes that Americans must understand that our nation “is much more than the emanation of an amorphous Anglo-American liberty”: “The United States is indeed a nation and a regime that has prided itself on being founded.” Mahoney notes that while the founders’ generation certainly “built on the considerable achievements of English liberty,” they also went beyond those specific traditions, declaring certain self-evident truths that applied to “all mankind.” But theirs was not an untethered universalism that somehow could safeguard the natural rights of everyone throughout the world. Instead, these truths were given “expression in the concrete exercise of political liberty within a self-governing nation-state,” or a specific “national form.” He concludes by noting that there “is thus ample room for political science to theorize, and reinforce, the essential link between the national form of government and the regime of modern liberty.”

At RealClearEducation, editor Nathan Harden focuses on the antisemitism that’s been rising at college campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. He notes that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is currently “conducting more than three dozen investigations related to antisemitism complaints.” One of the most glaring issues are universities like UC Berkley, once bastions of free speech in the tumultuous 1960s, which have seemingly “grown instantly timid in the face of hate speech or even physical attacks against Jews.” As criticisms become violent, moving from constitutionally protected speech to speech is outside of the purview of the First Amendment, far too many college presidents and administrators have buckled. Harden writes that many of the same people “who had spent years disinviting controversial speakers…suddenly became free speech champions in the face of calls for the death of Jews.” As he notes in conclusion, “No intellectually honest person could fail to question that double standard.”