Sublime

But in turning these questions from choices into rules, we have taken discretion and judgment away from people like Carroll. We prefer that projects go badly by the book. We minimize some risks but make delay and high costs routine.

Thus state intervention came to be discredited by a value proposition that was no longer aligned with individual aspirations. The laissez-faire approach was never attractive: it deprived the poor and even the middle class of access to affordable essential services. But the interventionist counter-offer ended up looking not that attractive, either:

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

“I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”

Bagley suggested, were two very real concerns: legitimacy and accountability. How can a government as powerful and vast as that of the United States maintain legitimacy? How could it maintain accountability to citizens?

Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region.