”Not in my lifetime,” I used to think when contemplating America’s decline and fall—a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but unreservedly ignores. Blind justice, disinterested leaders and institutions, tolerance of others, freedom of thought and speech, a Jeffersonian respect for reason and knowledge: Those who come after me will see the imperium’s collapse and will begin the work of restoration, but not I.

So I long assumed. And so does the pace of events suggest I may well be wrong. Things I used to think would take, maybe, 20 years now occur in five or six or seven. If I reckoned some turn of history’s wheel was a decade out, what do you know but that it now seems hard upon us.

Decline and fall. It is not pleasant to live in such a time as ours, but it is, as the Chinese are credited with saying (or was it the Arabs?) interesting. Let us not, as we accept our fate, lose sight of the optimism within the apparent pessimism.

On May 2 the House passed a bill that, broadly speaking, defines as “antisemitic” any criticism of Israel, or—heaven forbid!—disapproval of Israel as a “Jewish state.” The kookier House members have been trying to get this rationally disconnected piece of legislation to the floor for eight years. The House now sends the Antisemitism Awareness Act to the Senate on a 320–to–19 vote.

As if to second the House’s intent, President Biden announced, a May 7 event marking the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual remembrance day, a series of new legal and administrative measures to counter the nonexistent crisis of antisemitism that now overtakes the U.S. the way a Communist takeover did in the 1950s. Will someone explain why we hear daily about all this antisemitism but cannot see anything of it more than the odd, unalarming case—the everyday here-and-there variety? Someone, anyone?

This is an assault on reason, language, law—and even that highest of American “values”—common sense. It is a sign of American weakness and further advances this weakness. I would ask what the people pushing this bill are thinking, but the question implies an assumption one ought not make.

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