But there are also some signs that the center is fighting back on some of the most elite campuses in the country, that some of the “best” still do, in fact, possess the necessary convictions. There is no question that the worst are still “full of passionate intensity,” and we do live in a precarious place in our national life. This isn’t a column about doom, however, but rather about hope. The United States is certainly a nation built through raw power, as so many nations are, but at its best, it’s also built around a series of ideas, a declaration that its center requires, at a bare minimum, the promises of the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech. I’ve never interpreted the center in Yeats’s poem to mean something like a politically moderate middle but rather a moral foundation, the ideological core of a nation and its people. The extremist attacks on free speech (from right and left) degrade American democracy, and those attacks are especially acute on college campuses, whether they come from angry left-wing students who shout down conservative speakers or from vengeful right-wing legislators who pass laws restricting free expression in the academy or from the online activism that often demands that universities discipline scholars for engaging in provocative (but constitutionally protected) speech. With each mass shooting, I think, “Things fall apart.”īut there are other ways in which the center finds itself under siege. 6 is a prime example of the “passionate intensity” of one of the worst movements in American life.

When I read these words, dramatic, violent events come first to mind. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” “Things fall apart the center cannot hold,” writes Yeats. Three lines in particular resonate in troubled times. The poem, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I and during the height of the Russian Civil War, vividly captures the feeling that events are sliding out of control. William Butler Yeats’s “ The Second Coming” has been called the most plundered poem in the English language, and it’s easy to see why.

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