In a 60 Minutes interview that aired shortly before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Morley Safer asked William F. Buckley Jr., “Has there ever been a liberal Buckley? What would you do if one came along and openly proclaimed to be?”

Buckley’s response: “Pray for him.”

Every element of the college admissions scandal, aka “Operation Varsity Blues,” is fascinating.

There are the players: a shady high school counselor turned admissions consultant, the 36-year-old Harvard grad who sold his talents for standardized testing to the highest bidder, the comely actresses from Full House and Desperate Housewives, the fashion designer, the casino magnate. Who would have thought that one of the major headlines of 2019 would be “Lori Loughlin released on bond”?

The best narrative art eschews didacticism in favor of subtlety and nuance and moral reflection. The Polish film Cold War, released last year and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is no exception. It tells the story, inspired by Pawlikowski’s parents, of Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and Zula Lichón (Joanna Kulig), whose amour fou burns against the backdrop of postwar Europe.

“The most important political event of the twentieth century,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1976, “is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.” Plenty of self-described Marxist and socialist regimes existed throughout the world, Kristol recognized. It was rather the ideas behind such regimes that had reached a moral and intellectual endpoint. Nor was this passing away entirely to be cheered. “For with the passing of the socialist ideal,” Kristol went on, “there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the Western civilization which emerged from that tradition.”