A column from Helen Andrews in the latest print edition of National Review compares the current spate of college campus protests with the First and Second Great Awakenings, the religious revivals that preceded the American Revolution and the Civil War.

While some readers are likely to consider the comparisons a bit forced, Andrews still offers some valuable observations about the current campus meltdowns.

What is behind all this? The same factors that gave us the late-’90s campus tantrum are partly to blame, since most have continued unchanged or gotten worse. Nothing paves the way for PC like ignorance, and the farther removed we get from the last generation to receive a proper education, the more ignorant college students become. Millennials have no idea that the rule of law and the presumption of innocence are older and more important concepts than intersectionality and white privilege. To them, they’re all just phrases that somebody made up, sometime before yesterday. They glibly refer to Amherst’s “legacy of oppression” and Yale’s “history of institutionalized racism,” but they cannot explain what they mean by those phrases. As far as I can tell, they just mean an institution existed prior to 1980. They are also more ignorant than ever of life outside the upper middle class, thanks to the increasing self-segregation of the classes that Charles Murray has identified in Coming Apart, and this ignorance leaves them ready to believe the most outlandish things about the marginalized groups they claim to champion. Sometimes when your cousin tells you he was literally minding his own business when the cop started hassling him you let it pass to spare his dignity, but these Belmont kids omit the grain of salt. …

… [T]here is a limit to how much can be gleaned from listening to what these activists say. Their slogans are drawn from the ideological air supply. They seize on whatever grievances are closest to hand simply for the sake of having a grievance. If it weren’t one damn thing, it’d be another — as can be seen from the way the latest contagion has jumped from campus to campus regardless of local conditions. The driving compulsion to complain is the phenomenon here, not the complaints.