After Donald Trump had nailed down the Republican nomination Dennis Prager (who says he will vote for Trump “because there is no choice”) published “The Scariest Reason Trump Won.”

Reflecting on the fact that Trump meets none of the current definitions of conservative — whether neo- paleo- or social — Prager posed the obvious question: Why are the majority of Republican voters not conservative? While not dismissing any of the conventional explanations for the rise of Trump — the frustrations of white working-class Americans revulsion against political correctness the vast free media attention focused on Trump etc. — Prager offered what he called the scariest reason of all: “Most Americans no longer know what America stands for.”

Prager did not dwell on the link between that ignorance and Trump’s popularity. Had he done so he might have pointed to Trump's authoritarianism his apparent belief — shared with President Obama — that presidents enjoy unrestrained power and may rule by executive decree and secret agreements when Congress is not sufficiently compliant or his threat to gut the First Amendment to make it easier for him to sue people who say unkind things about him.

The problem identified by Prager threatens the United States in a way it would not affect other countries. Most countries are bonded by ties of blood land and history. Not so America. It is the only country based on a common creed: the Constitution (and some would argue the Declaration of Independence).

That common creed however is increasingly little known. How many American high school students today have read even a smattering of The Federalist Papers the foremost explication of the Constitution? The College Board recently came up with a new curriculum for the Advanced Placement American History exam which omitted any mention of James Madison the principal draftsman of the Constitution and along with Alexander Hamilton the main author of The Federalist Papers.

One of the reasons that immigration is such a fraught issue today is that the process of Americanization and education in the founding creed has ceased to exist. Our grandparents and great-grandparents often went to school at night to learn English and studied the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They knew what they were coming to not just what they were fleeing from.

I would guess that close to 99 percent of American law students have never read the entire Constitution even once. And I don’t mean at third-tier law schools but at Yale and Harvard. I know I never did. Nor amazingly did I consider that any reason not to aspire to a career teaching constitutional law.

Trump followers however are far from the only Americans to lack a basic grounding in their country’s founding values and political creed. The failure to transmit those values or even to consider them important is far greater on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

The Berkeley Free Speech movement of the early 1960s may have marked the beginning of the highly politicized campus but it was at least deeply rooted in the traditional American value of free speech. American campuses today by contrast are filled with would-be commissars eager to pronounce what opinions may be spoken and which not and to prosecute the recalcitrant. Once small-town America was mocked by the intelligentsia for its narrow-minded conformity. But today the university campuses are the redoubts of political conformity.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof a man of the left writes that intolerance “is disproportionately an instinct of the left.” He had the temerity to suggest that the pursuit of all forms of racial ethnic and gender diversity on campus had somehow left out ideological and religious diversity: “We’re fine with people who don’t look like us as long as they think like us.” To which one of his Facebook followers replied charmingly “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?” There you have the left-wing argument against ideological diversity — all opinions but mine are by definition those of cretins.

As recently as Bill Clinton’s presidency most Americans still viewed religious conscience as something upon which the state should not trample. The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) passed Congress with barely any opposition. The pendulum has swung so far the other way against showing respect for the individual’s religious conscience that major corporations not just Democratic politicians now threaten to boycott states that enact RFRA statutes. (Corporate America took another bow to political correctness last week when the NBA decided to shift its 2017 All-Star game from Charlotte because of North Carolina’s determination to maintain men’s and women’s bathrooms.)

WHILE THE UNITED STATES may be the only modern nation-state founded more on creed than blood land and history there is one ancient precedent: the Jews. We came into being as a nation with the acceptance of Torah at Sinai and acceptance of the Torah remains the only means for joining the Jewish People.

Sadly there is another parallel to America. The younger generation of American Jews knows nothing of what it means to be Jewish of the beliefs for which their ancestors willingly gave up their lives or of history’s greatest miracle — the survival of the Jews as a nation for 2 000 years removed from their Land. Worse younger American Jews by and large are completely apathetic and incurious about these matters.

That apathy stands in stark contrast to the younger generation in Israel which manifests a growing interest in the Jewish bookshelf and in gaining familiarity with its contents. Young Israeli Jews have an intuition that their self-understanding is tied to knowing what it means to be Jewish and why it mattered so deeply to their forebears. And they further intuit that the strength of Israel’s social fabric and therefore the continued existence of the “Jewish state” depends to a large extent on Israeli Jews being able to answer the question: Why does the collective existence of the Jewish People matter?

Not so for the vast majority of younger American Jews. The Conservative movement which for a generation maintained some kind of minimal attachment to tradition among Jews moving to the suburbs from ethnically homogenous neighborhoods has imploded. “Unaffiliated” is the fastest growing segment of non-Orthodox American Jewry. And even were an American Jewish teenager or college student to wander into one of the heterodox temples the most prominent message would be some form of why Jews must not think of themselves as a chosen people or by Whom they were chosen and for what purpose.

The last Jewish candidate standing in this year’s election is Jill Stein of the Green Party. She was a class ahead of me in high school. Apparently the Green Party’s interests extend beyond the environment. (Stein herself was previously the Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of Massachusetts.)

The party’s foreign policy platform calls for the end of all US aid to Israel which is accused inter alia of apartheid collective punishment and defiance of international law. In her private tweets Stein displays the combination of arrogance and ignorance that only two Harvard degrees can purchase in pronouncing Israel’s “war crimes and human rights violations... off the charts.”

While Stein is no longer young her views are increasingly mainstream among young American Jews who are too detached from the Jewish story to even become minimally informed about their fellow Jews in Israel. And that is ultimately an even greater tragedy than young Americans’ ignorance of the Constitution.

The national mood in the United States is dour and not just because of the unsavory electoral choice looming ahead. Following the recent assassination of five police officers by a sniper at a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally in Dallas and the murder of three more policemen by a gunman in Baton Rouge Louisiana the already low rate of Americans professing to be satisfied — 29 percent — plunged another 12 points to 17 percent. The fear of a race war presently tops citizens’ concerns.

The poisonous attitudes toward the police that created the backdrop for Dallas and Baton Rouge represent another failure by American political elites. President Obama and Hillary Clinton know that her chances in November depend on replicating the high turnout and near unanimous Democratic vote of blacks in 2008 and 2012. So there have been no Sister Souljah moments from leading Democratic politicians for BLM whose marches feature chants like “What do we want? Dead cops” and “Pigs in a blanket fry ’em like bacon.”

Instead Al Sharpton with a 30-year history of instigating racial violence some fatal and rap artists who celebrate killing cops and other figures of the criminal justice system have been White House guests.

On his way to a memorial service in Dallas (whose police chief is black) the president claimed that “there are data and evidence to back up the concerns being expressed by these protesters” and suggested that acknowledging the problem would make cops safer. Last July he told an NAACP conference “The bottom line is that in too many places black boys and black men Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law.” He cited disproportionate rates of incarceration.

But as Heather MacDonald author of The War on Cops points out those rates of incarceration are fully explained by the rates of criminal activity of blacks and Latinos. The percentage of blacks in prison dovetails with the percentage of perpetrators of particular crimes as determined by victims’ and witnesses’ statements.

Harvard professor of economics Roland G. Fryer Jr. recently completed a study of 1332 police shootings in ten major police departments. Fryer who is black declared the findings “the most surprising result of my career.” He determined that police were more likely to shoot without being attacked when the suspects were white. And that in situations in which police might have been expected to shoot but did not they were 20 percent less likely to do so if the suspects were black. (He did find that various forms of nonlethal force were more likely to be applied against blacks.)

Black Lives Matter has angrily attacked any politician who dared to say “all lives matter.” But even with respect to black lives the only ones that matter to BLM protestors are those lost in confrontations with police. The carnage in American inner-cities from black on black crime does not concern them. Following riots in Ferguson Missouri and Baltimore police have dramatically reduced arrests and early interventions. The result has been a 60 percent spike in post-Ferguson murder rates in ten heavily black cities.

In short the greatest victims of Black Lives Matter and those who pander to it are blacks themselves.