Dorothy Rabinowitz’s brilliant piece today in the Wall Street Journal makes the important point that the genuine innovation of Barack Obama’s presidency is that it has imported much of its sense of the United States and its role in the world straight from the precincts of the post-1960s academy:

The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world. They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him.