Some sixty years ago, a group of American intellectuals—many of them Jewish academics including Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter—authored “The Radical Right,” bringing social science theory to bear on the attempt to understand and counter McCarthyism.

Back then, academe—especially Jewish academe—felt threatened by irrational forces, not within the university, but buffeting it from the outside. How different today.

No need for me to go into particulars, but just identify a real or imagined grievance along racial or gender lines, attach it to a self-serving agitator or journalist dedicated to anything but the search for truth, and ignite it with today’s “social media,” and—presto—you have a veritable “flash mob” shaking universities from the rafters to their foundations, with faculty competing to join, not reason with, student activists and administrators racing to stay ahead of the thundering herd rather than be run over by it.

This is not the way that universities, in theory and usually in practice, worked in the 1950s and even the 1960s—at least until late in the decade when today’s “tenured radicals” were manning the barricades.

Of course, the ideological fashions du jour have changed and continue to change. Old-fashioned welfare state liberalism—a civic religion to Jews earning-and-learning their way in America—has significantly been supplanted by “identity politics” and a new “progressivism” that has none of the intellectual distinction of the “old progressivism” that a century ago motivated Jewish founders of the late, lamented “New Republic” such as Walter Weyl and Walter Lippmann.

American Jews after World War II were only beginning to leave their greatest mark on American intellectual life on and off campus. They certainly had their political passions, some misplaced, but they did not worship irrationality or view themselves as sorcerer’s apprentices smart enough to control and guide its excesses in the cause, of course, of a utopian society.

Robert Bolt in “A Man For All Seasons” (1966) warned about the tsunamis whose waves our demagogues now try to ride, just as the political weather system on-and-off campus began to change, perhaps forever:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

Reason and law—including presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt even for perceived enemies of “progressive” norms—are the only protections we have against the unspeakable. Though coming at it from a different angle than Thomas More, American Jews used to understand this. Do they still?