MORE ON THE COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW CONTROVERSY: “If you’re a student editor and distrust the leadership, you try to “preempt” it by acting irregularly, as the editors here did by rushing the article online. If you’re on the board and you distrust the student editors, you use that action to justify shuttering the website altogether. If you’re a student editor and distrust other editors, you strategize against them with leaks and so on. And so, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, it goes. The value of routine practices, even at law reviews, is that they help stave off the war of all against all.”

Yes, one of the legacies of the New Left is the repeated thing that routine practices should fall when set against the overwhelming importance of The Current Thing. This is almost always a mistake with dreadful consequences, but the New Left is all about mistakes with dreadful consequences. One might even say that it’s made those mistakes into a routine practice of its own.