Here in Atlanta, around Emory, you hear about a friend or neighbor who got a layoff notice yesterday – no April Fool’s joke – among about 2,400 being cut from the CDC. Researchers who have worked at the agency for 10 or 25 years will be gone, and as some who were protesting on Clifton Road told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, so will their ongoing projects.

Elections have consequences, but never like this. This is not just politics or bureaucratic restructuring. Trump, Vance and Musk are undoing my world, a lifetime that gave me 25 years of newsrooms and editors, and another 20 of university libraries and students.

In those last 20 years, I was bemused, but not bothered, by the academy’s “tenured radicals.” These were the hippies-turned-Ivy League intellectuals that so upset my Bennington classmate Roger Kimball when he went on to get a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. Kimball turned into a Radical Right intellectual in disgust, and recently spoke glowingly of Trump at conservative Hillsdale College.

He praised Trump for his energy and “common sense” in tearing down the crazy “culture” of gender pluralism, porn-art, anti-racism and federal bureaucracy.

As a journalist, I tended to put all that into a broader perspective. My cluttered culture, my world, grew from a childhood exposure to such popularized high culture as Kenneth Clark’s old BBC series “Civilization,” Leonard Bernstein’s albums of Young People’s Concerts, and Clifton Fadiman’s Book-of-the-Month Club.

I am confused by Kimball telling his Hillsdale audience that these very things from my childhood – Kenneth Clark, Leonard Bernstein, the Book-of-the-Month Club – represent the kind of high-minded but common-sense “culture” that he thinks Trump will revive.

Really?

Whatever Trumpian culture we might see in a re-made Kennedy Center or Smithsonian Institute seems like the fake Italy of Las Vegas, Disney World or Mar-a-Lago. I’m headed for the real thing – Italy itself.

Like popularized high culture, there’s a popularized philosophy that Kimball and I share, expressed in the U.S. Constitution and other Great Ideas of American history. I was moved almost to tears (as my wife was) by the final hours of that philosophy from Sen. Cory Booker’s record-breaking 24-plus-hour filibuster from his desk in the U.S. Senate. Especially this quote from Learned Hand.

Another deep source of my world was my father’s teaching tool for American history and journalism, which he called a Time Map. Here’s my blog post and Salvation South essays on that.