Tunku Varadarajan

If you want the long view of what’s gone wrong with American higher education, you could do worse than talk with Harvey Mansfield. Mr. Mansfield is 92, and he taught at Harvard for well over half a century, retiring from the government department only last year. A scholar of Machiavelli and Tocqueville, he is a lifelong conservative. He says he leaves behind a department with only one professor “who isn’t a liberal or progressive.” That “self-professed conservative” is Eric Nelson, 46, who studies the political thought of the early modern Western world.

Nigel Farage may be the most immodest man in the U.K. The leader of the Reform UK party—commonly described as far-right, a label he disparages as “bollocks”—is leading what he calls a “revolt against a political elite that has failed the British people.” His stated aims in next Thursday’s national election are to make the ruling […]

This immigrant group has prospered without quotas or grievances. You may be surprised to learn that the wife of “hillbilly" J.D.

Olivier Roy is a French political scientist, a man of the old-fashioned, realist, moderate European left. He doesn’t chase after progressive fads and doesn’t applaud the secularism that has driven religion out of public spaces. He has a healthy disregard for the wokeness that besets Western societies. His disregard extends to the globalized economy, which he thinks has contributed to the “deterritorialisation” of anchorless human beings. Most of all, he feels that something is badly amiss in the values of a Western world that appears to have lost its cultural swagger.

Charles Gasparino of Fox Business excoriates the progressive pieties that dominate the modern boardroom.

FacebookTwitterLinkedInCharles Gasparino is a gladiatorial journalist. When he steps into the arena to fight a money-man or enterprise that he believes is anticapitalist or crooked, he can be brutal. Making an enemy of him is not for the faint-hearted: Watch him trade insults with his critics on social media. He was once a Wall Street reporter for this newspaper, where editors and colleagues remember him for his no-holds-barred style. Which is precisely how we’d describe the approach in “Go Woke, Go Broke,” Mr. Gasparino’s blistering account of “how corporate America became something close to a foot soldier in the progressive movement.” Now a senior correspondent at the Fox Business Network, Mr. Gasparino is also a columnist at the New York Post, whose irreverent, indignant (and often irresistible) tabloid style is very much in evidence here. (Fox, the Post and the Journal share common ownership.)

George Orwell (né Eric Blair) left England for Burma at age 19, a freshly minted graduate of Eton College, the poshest school in the British Empire. The year was 1922, and Orwell/Blair would remain in Burma until 1927, a member of the imperial police force. What little we know of his time there can be learned from his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and two essays, "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). His Burmese days have always carried with them an air of mystery and an absence of detail, which drove Paul Theroux—travel writer, essayist, novelist, sage—to set himself the task of imagining the young man's years in this eastern edge of the Raj. The result is Burma Sahib , a novel published earlier this year, that brings to life Orwell/Blair's time in Burma.

A GREAT CALM APPEARS to have descended over this vast and cantankerous nation, a great and blessed sense of relief. If the calm and the relief dissipate in the new year, after Donald Trump takes office, so be it. But for the moment, let us give thanks for an election that was conducted and tabulated without incident on the appointed day, and which concluded— Hallelujah!—within hours of the last polls closing. We do not have to wait for days, or weeks, or even, as some feared, into the new year.

City Hall here is the new temple of political bipartisanship, with Mayor Eric Adams its head priest. The Democrat tells me he’s eager to work with Donald Trump. “I spoke with him three times immediately after the election,” he says in an interview in his office, and then once more at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, where the two “exchanged pleasantries” at a mixed martial-arts fight.

The American revolution produced a new idea: a nation-state united by something other than ethnic affiliations.