<On university campuses, demands circulated to disinvest from companies doing business with that "apartheid state" [Israel] -- on the premise, one supposes, that a democratic society with an elected government and a civilian-controlled military is demonic in a way that an autocratic cabal sponsoring the suicide-murder of civilians is not.

Actually, they are "demonic" (Hanson's choice of word, not mine) in precisely the same way. South Africa was "a democratic society with an elected government and a civilian-controlled military" when it formulated and enforced apartheid (and, incidentally, had close ties to Israel). What makes Israel's treatment of Palestinians not apartheid - the fact that Palestinians are a minority in their homeland, and black South Africans were not?

As in the medieval church or among Soviet apparatchiks, the pull of groupspeak is always strong among compliant and opportunistic elites. For today's intellectuals, professors and artists, being on the team pays real dividends when it comes to tenure, promotion, publication, reviews, lecture invitations, social acceptance and psychic reassurance. And the dividends are compound: One is a lockstep member of one's crowd and one enjoys the frisson of dissidence, of being at variance, but always so comfortably at variance, with one's benighted fellow citizens.

And this is different from politically and economically conservative 1950s academia... how?

What other "compliant and opportunistic elites" relying on "the pull of groupspeak" can you think of? (Hint: large marble buildings situated near the Potomac River)

Obesity, not starvation, is our chief health problem;

Obesity, as those who pay attention well know, is not a symptom of proper nutrition. Think of that as a political metaphor, as well.

we are more worried about our 401(k) portfolios than about hostile tribes across the border.

That is a matter of survival of the individual - this country's economy requires a certain minimum expenditure to remain alive past the age where earning a daily income is possible. Thousands of us, myself included, will have no such resources - small wonder that those who do worry more about losing theirs than about some tin-horn tyrant on the opposite side of the planet - not even when Georgie stamps his foot and demands that We are Good and They are Evil.

Oh, by the way... from the Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed., 2001) available online at Bartleby.com - an excerpt from the entry on Manichaeism:

Basic to the religion’s doctrine was the conflicting dualism between the realm of God, represented by light and by spiritual enlightenment, and the realm of Satan, symbolized by darkness and by the world of material things. To account for the existence of evil in a world created by God, Mani posited a primal struggle in which the forces of Satan separated from God; humanity, composed of matter, that which belongs to Satan, but infused with a modicum of godly light, was a product of this struggle, and was a paradigm of the eternal war between the forces of light and those of darkness.

In what way is George II not a Manichaean? Oh, yes, of course... he's a Republican; they're known for their fondness for material things.