By now, most everyone listening in has followed the recent troubles of the New York Times

opinion page. The Times published an op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas,

and a great many members of the opinioninion Page staff not only disagreed

with it, but they say that they felt threatened by it. It wasn't wrong. It was immoral. Now, for

present purposes, I don't want to focus on the subject of the piece itself or the specific

complaints lodged against it. What I want to focus on is what happened

next. The complaints gained traction and power, and the momentum snowballed into a full-on revolt

against the senior editorial team, eventually forcing the opinion editor of the New York Times to resign.

He could not apologize, much less

defend his judgment in the course of an argument. No one was interested in being persuaded.

The revolutionaries were certain that they were right, so right, that an opposing view was not to be

criticized, but cancelled. What happened over the past days of the New York Times

has been happening in different forms and at different levels, but it has unmistakably been

happening with greater frequency throughout the world of ideas. Other magazines and publications

have been forced to fire writers recently hired. There are purity tests, and there seems

to be no path for the accused to enjoy ablution to wash away the sin of wrongthink.

Of a sudden, there are parts of American intellectual life that seem to be experiencing a cultural

revolution. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm

your host, Jonathan Silver. I wanted to learn more about the roots of the revolutionary mind.

So today I'm discussing the political mindset of Vladimir Lenin with Professor Gary Saul Morrison.

The focus of our discussion is an essay that he published in the new criterion back in October

called Lenin Think.

...