President Nixon lamented in 1969 to his urban-affairs advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that there was a dearth of poetry in the White House and had the former professor draw up a list of books for him to read. Nixon soon became enthralled with the 1966 classic biography of Disraeli by Robert Blake. The book was...
Wednesday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama testified to her greatness and goodness and readiness to be president. And all saw in the Republican Convention in Cleveland a festival of darkness and dystopia. Nor is this unusual. For, as the saying goes, the ins “point with...
Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy...
Waving off the clerics who had come to administer last rites, Voltaire said: “All my life I have ever made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good...
Donald Trump has made it clear from the beginning that he’s in it to win it. He has said that if he ends up losing the presidential race it will all have been for nothing: “If I don’t go all the way, and if I don’t win, I will consider it to be a total...
Groupthink is the grand code of political commentary, together with its corollary; groupthink is wrong, nearly all the time. Last year saw a spectacular instance in British politics. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats party, accepted a challenge from Nigel Farage to debate the EU on TV. “He’s mad!” we said. “Nobody comes alive...
The self-righteousness and smugness of Ted Cruz in refusing to endorse Donald Trump, then walking off stage in Cleveland, smirking amidst the boos, takes the mind back in time. At the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July of 1964, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, having been defeated by Barry Goldwater, took the podium to introduce a...
There are some simple rules governing modern American political conventions. If you speak at the convention, you endorse the nominee. If you can’t endorse the nominee, you don’t go. You certainly don’t use a prime time speaking slot to try to sabotage your party’s fall campaign. A number of Trump’s foes have refused to endorse...
While what’s said before the TV cameras at a political convention is important, just as important is what goes on behind the scenes in the meeting rooms. That’s where policymakers of all stripes meet and hammer out a political party’s future. That’s what’s going on this week in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention and...
Last Saturday, during lunch with Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf at Rockford’s Prairie Street Brewhouse, I expressed suspicion that the coup in Turkey—just over 24 hours old at that time, and in the final stages of collapse—was Erdogan’s Reichstag fire: a stage-managed event, carried out by clueless stooges, meant to enhance the power of the...
On Monday night, I had the good fortune to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, thanks to the generosity of a friend who gave me a guest pass. There has been much media-generated doom and gloom about this convention, but the negative expectations generated by a hostile press were not confirmed by what I...
Neither George W. Bush, the Republican Party nominee in 2000 and 2004, nor Jeb, the dethroned Prince of Wales, will be in Cleveland. Nor will John McCain or Mitt Romney, the last two nominees. These former leaders would like it thought that high principle keeps them away from a GOP convention that would nominate Donald...
This will mark an historic turning point. The tension in Turkey has been intense. Not any more. Erdogan will now “cleanse the military,” as he put it. In other words, he will make sure that the military is never again able to defend what it considers to be its prime mandate: the secular democratic constitutional...
“Her mind is shot.” That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president. It all began with an interview last week when the justice was asked for her thoughts on a Trump presidency. Ginsburg went on a tear. “I can’t...
We’ve watched this movie before. We will soon watch it again. In mere minutes following the latest jihad attack in Nice—assuming another hasn’t occurred before this appears in print—the script had already written itself. Shockingly, it seems the perpetrator is—again!—a Muslim. What are the odds? Evidently, a Tunisian who moved to Nice is a “Frenchman.”...
Back when the Republican feedlot was full of wannabes for the next presidential nomination, this site published my little tongue-in-cheek pieces, “Looking for Mr. Republican” (Sept. 13, 2013) and “Don’t Look Any Further, Mr. Republican Has Been Found” (April 3, 2015), describing the ideal Republican candidate. First, he must be presentable and respectable—someone you would...
Conservatives may be tempted to wonder whether it’s worth fighting. In this soundbite, instant-dislike, tl;dr, flashsnipe, banal, fractious, impressionistic, politicized culture of ours, our instinct can be to retreat, to separate fully, to disengage. I’ve been there, and when I have, I’ve been wrong. So long as we are alive, there is ground to be...
After the massacre of five Dallas cops, during a protest of police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, President Obama said, “America is not as divided as some have suggested.” Former D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey, an African-American, says we are “sitting on a powder keg.” Put me down as agreeing with the...
When I awoke on Friday morning, I picked up the copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer delivered to my house and read the headline on the front page, above the fold: “Killing of black men ‘troubling.'” The article referred to President Obama’s comments in Poland on the police killings of two black men in Louisiana...
Does Hillary Clinton possess the integrity and honesty to be president of the United States? Or are those quaint and irrelevant considerations in electing a head of state in 21st-century America? These are the questions put on the table by the report from FBI Director James Comey on what his agents unearthed in their criminal...
“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Enoch Powell’s majestic generalization has few exceptions. Nigel Farage’s is outstanding. He has just stood down from the leadership of the United Kingdom Independence Party, having led...
The outcome of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum on June 23 stunned the London-based elite class. It laid bare the deep chasm between Britain’s political and media machine and the alienated, angry and disillusioned majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to David Cameron’s miscalculation, hoi polloi used the opportunity to express their abiding dislike not only...
The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789, the stated purpose of which was “the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff...
Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 942 pp., $39.95). Professor Wilson of Oxford University argues that the history of the Sanctum Imperium Romanum, despite its centrality to the history of Europe and its immense longevity (it lasted for more than a millennium, twice as...
London is more pleased with itself than usual at the moment, which is saying something. The city has just elected its first Muslim mayor, and people here are calling it our “Obama moment.” The Great British Multicultural Experiment, which many thought had failed, is alive and well, they said. Sadiq Khan, the new mayor, is...
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
Money Monster Directed by Jodie Foster Screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf Produced by TriStar Pictures Distributed by Sony Pictures Mustang Directed and written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven Produced by CG Cinema Distributed by Cohen Media Group When I graduated from college with a degree in English literature, it occurred to me I...
“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch. This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college. In that particular summer, it...
At the end of the first volume of Charles Moore’s lapidary trilogy, we left Mrs. Thatcher standing in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1982, surrounded by the shades of past national leaders, bathed in public approval and growing global respect as the victor of the Falklands War and standard-bearer for a new and dynamic kind of...
A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him. Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...
“Hillsboro’s a conservative community,” said Robert, and for three days and three nights I attempted to figure out what he meant. He said it right after we arrived at his shop, high atop a lush, sylvan hill off Beaver Creek Road, five miles south of Hillsboro in Western Wisconsin, the “Driftless Area.” It’s called “driftless”...
April may be the cruelest month, but this year May took the cake. It was then that we were reminded that human life is a political football, and that players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When word came that President Obama was scheduled to appear at...
Donald J. Trump is the political issue of our time. Yet Mr. Trump is, in a very real sense, peripheral to present events. He is a result, not the effective cause; a symptom, not the disease. The significant thing is not the rebel candidate but the crisis of the Republican Party, so long arriving, which...
Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful British prime ministers of modern times, was known to her enemies and detractors as “That Bloody Woman” (see Derek Turner’s review in this issue). America’s equivalent for Republicans and conservatives for the past 30 years has been Hillary Clinton, so much Mrs. Thatcher’s inferior in intelligence, talent, and...
As usual, there are too many books on my reading table. As I continue with Les Trois Mousquetaires,which gets better with every page, I’m also finishing La parabola di Giobbe, a work of Christology (among other things) by David Maria Turoldo, a very holy man heavily inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, in whose own work...
A sign hangs in the waiting room of my doctor’s office. It advises patients how many appointments were missed in the previous month and how many work hours this cost the staff. The practice has no recourse against patients who fail to turn up. There was no cost for the appointment in the first place. ...
After twice reading what so far has been available of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and viewing the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, I do not share Douglas Wilson’s impression that these are “rootless entertainment for a rootless people, lost entertainment for a lost people, and vile entertainment for...
Things have never been grimmer. Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...
Ideologues tend to place a great value on economic laws. I started out my undergraduate career hoping for a double major in political science and economics. My goal was to administer a breadline and to understand why it was necessary. I was doing very well in political philosophy and public administration, but lagging a bit...
As an experiment in social reconstruction, ObamaCare was nothing compared with what’s coming down the line as a result of the Obama administration’s Friday the 13th diktat that all public schools in the United States must allow every student to use the bathroom of his/her/zis/zir choice, or risk federal civil-rights lawsuits and the withholding of...
My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in political science, but the chief work that helped me to understand the practice of politics is one of history: The Stakes of Power: 1845–1877, by Roy F. Nichols. Political science shares with sociology a bias toward presentism, describing political structures as they currently exist with no sense...
In Tuesday’s indictment of free trade as virtual economic treason, The Donald has really set the cat down among the pigeons. For, in denouncing NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all backed by Bush I and II, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Trump is all but calling his own party leaders...
It was the first meeting of The John Randolph Club, held somewhere in the wilds of Texas. I was there at the urging of Murray Rothbard, who was enthusiastic about this gathering of libertarians and paleoconservatives in the wake of the Cold War’s end. With the commies out of the Kremlin, said Murray, the Old...
At the United Nations in the fall of 2009, Barack Obama acknowledged, with customary self-regard, “the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world,” no doubt referring to his pledge about the receding oceans, healing the planet and reviving the animal kingdom, and the unprecedented wisdom of his associates and himself. Sure enough: The Russian...
The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony.” The leaders of both major U.S. political parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of global order. This period of “primacy” was marked by military interventions in...
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains a lighthouse, the beam sweeping past the scene for a moment of blinding illumination before passing on to darkness. Though Orwell enjoined us against cliché, Hamlet’s “More honoured in the breach than the observance” applies: Everybody lauds Orwell, but few appear to have read him. And of...
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning has received exceptional attention and nearly universal praise. Prof. Timothy Snyder’s knowledge of the holocaust is almost encyclopedic. This is his second large book devoted to the horrible history of much of Eastern Europe during World War II. His main inquiry and subject is what happened to...
One of the ways in which Bill Clinton presented himself as a “New Democrat” was his insistence that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Twenty-four years after Clinton’s election to the presidency, the national Democratic Party has given up any attempt to claim that they believe abortion is anything other than a...
In 1836, Robert Schumann told the composer who had dropped by that his favorite of Chopin’s compositions was the Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, and the composer agreed with his judgment. Anton Rubinstein thought that everything to be revered in music died with Chopin in 1849, and for this declaration, he has been condemned...