That poison-Ivy League

“The young,” said Leon Trotsky, that great idol of campuses everywhere, “are the barometer of the nation.”

He could have added that not only do the young indicate pressure, but they can also drive it up to a bursting point. Trotsky was perfectly aware of how to channel destructive youthful energy into the right conduit.

When the first Russian revolution broke out in 1905, he himself was 26. Lenin’s nickname in the Party was ‘Old Man’, and so he was, relative to most revolutionaries. Lenin was 35.

Cross the Atlantic, fast-forward to April, 2024, and you’ll be regaled with the magnificent spectacle of youngsters in the late teens, early 20s, turning American campuses into a sort of Nuremberg rally, minus the torch-lit Riefenstahl pomp.

The Ivy League leads the way, and so it should. Such a role behoves its status in American academic life and, more important, life in general.

The eight universities that form the Ivy League are the smithies of the ruling elite. Their graduates densely populate the editorial rooms of The New York Times and CNN, the offices of the most influential law firms – and of course the Capitol Building, along with its clones in the state capitals.

Hence it’s America’s future that’s rioting on campuses at present, and the future looks bleak. For what’s going on there is more sinister than the usual display of gonadic rebelliousness.

Such emotions always bubble close to young hearts, overriding the brains still short of proper wiring. Yet it takes licence for youthful passions to burst out into a mass disorder, someone or something telling them: “Now you can.”

Reports suggest that student groups have been infiltrated by professional mayhem organisers, and I’m sure that’s the case. Mass revolts are never organised by the masses. Someone has to tell them where to go, at what time, what placards to prepare, what slogans to chant, which friends to extol, which enemies to demonise.

But no organiser, however expert, can exploit the feelings that don’t exist. There has to be something lodged in the youngsters’ hearts already to make them receptive to evil prodding.

So what drives American Ivy League students on those riotous pro-Hamas marches? Definitely not self-identification with the downtrodden: it costs some $80,000 a year to keep a youngster at Harvard, and the other elite universities aren’t far behind. Hence the students are either rich enough for their families to shell out (in which case they are sitting pretty) or academically gifted enough to qualify for scholarships (ditto).

It may be simple ignorance of the nature of the Gaza conflict, its historical, political, cultural and religious background. Many Americans who are aghast with what’s going on are posting comments saying “This proves educated doesn’t always mean smart”. But whoever told them Ivy League students are educated?

I can’t judge their knowledge of natural sciences, and it’s probably rather good – especially if we discount the politicised woke brainwashing going on in biology classes. But what they are fed in the humanities is nothing but that, the sort of thing that probably makes Comrade Trotsky flash a proud avuncular smile from his grave.

So ignorance can’t be discounted, and a strong left-wing, which is to say destructive, bias certainly shouldn’t be. People alliteratively called ‘limousine liberals’ or ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’ intuitively take sides with enemies of the West, especially those describable as Third World.

So yes, add ignorance, leftist inclinations and youthful impetuosity together, and the picture begins to come together. But not completely.

There’s also the anti-Semitism, seemingly incongruous among youngsters whose brains are supposed to be thoroughly washed of any notions of racial or ethnic inequality. That, however, is one rinsing cycle that evidently isn’t working.

You might say that support for the ‘Palestinians’ presupposes some dislike of Israel and Zionism, and you’d be right. Yet equally right is the observation that anti-Zionism can be a righteous mask hiding the anti-Semitic scowl underneath.

When I was growing up in Moscow, the papers were full of scathing articles about Israel and the Zionists. These were illustrated with the kind of cartoons that would have made Julius Streicher wince at such a lack of subtlety. Obese, hook-nosed, vicious-looking, money-grabbing Jews with blood-dripping hands filled the pages of Pravda and Izvestia.

The grateful public was thus encouraged to indulge its latent anti-Semitism, and in Russia it doesn’t tend to stay latent for long. All it takes for it to come to the surface is that implicit licence I was talking about – “Now you can.”

But that was the Soviet Union, governed by evil men trying their utmost – and largely succeeding – to recast the whole nation in their image. Surely America, that paragon of what Tom Lehrer called “good and motherhood”, is free from such cave prejudices?

Apparently not. For those marching Ivy Leaguers don’t just scream anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas slogans, although these are nasty enough. The one that says “From the river to the sea”, for example, communicates a passion for exterminating everyone so demarcated, which is to say all Israelis.

But side by side with such anti-Israeli invective, one sees placards saying, inter alia, “Jews, go back to Poland”. Now, before the Second World War the Jewish population of Poland was about four million. Now it’s some 4,500. When you recall the reasons for this demographic slide, you’ll realise how monstrous those Ivy League chants are.

It’s quite a banal truism to say, along with Churchill, that “If you’re not a liberal by age twenty, you have no heart. But if you’re not a conservative by age forty, you have no brain.”

This adage makes some sense if one refers to espousing conservative views, but this is a far cry from being an intuitive, temperamental – which is to say real – conservative. Most ex-Leftists are really intuitive Leftists who find out the hard way that socialist policies leave them less money for their families. So, along with the so-called neoconservatives, they add support of free markets to their enduring love of the welfare state. That the two things are mutually exclusive escapes them.

But yes, some people do outgrow what Trotsky’s colleague Lenin called “the infantile disorder of leftiness”. In my experience, however, few outgrow the more deep-rooted resentments of much older provenance, such as anti-Semitism.

However, those campus rioters aren’t yet old enough to have outgrown anything. They get their implicit licence from the adults, such as Joe Biden, who indulge in moral equivalence, that subterfuge of the intellectually deficient and morally defunct.

While condemning the pro-Hamas Walpurgisnacht, they never forget to add a note of disapproval of Israel’s oppression, not to say genocide, of the ‘Palestinians’. The youngsters’ hearing is selective, and that’s the only note that reaches their ears.

The ‘Now you can’ licence has been issued and happily snapped up. Out those Ivy Leaguers go, chanting neo-Nazi slogans with the best of the Neo-Nazis and neo-communist ones with the best of the neo-communists. One can’t shake the feeling that America’s future elite just may be a rather nasty lot.

That barometer so close to Comrade Trotsky’s heart has fallen off the wall and shattered. Careful you don’t cut your feet on the shards of glass.