Among democratic peoples, . . . the thread of time is broken at every moment, and the trace of the generations fades. You easily forget those who preceded you, and you have no idea about those who will follow you. Only those closest to you are of interest. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America During...
For decades, conservative commentators and writers have told anyone who would listen that America is going to hell in a handbag. (An aside: Why do people always go to hell in a handbag? If I must go to hell, I’d prefer a limousine with a fully stocked bar; some beloved books; a picnic basket overflowing...
The enormity of what we’re up against is something I acknowledge in the abstract, but blank out of my consciousness 99 percent of the time. It’s only when I come across an article like Alexander Rubinstein’s and Max Blumenthal’s recent exposé of the Omidyar Network that I’m jolted into awareness. As the article published by...
My housekeeper personifies the American Dream. Her journey from rags may not have ended in riches. But she now enjoys a solid middle-class existence after decades of backbreaking labor. Born and raised in the Mexican state of Puebla, Laura married her first and only boyfriend, Daniel, in her late teens. The newlyweds moved in with...
The bitter war of words that has taken place the best part of this past year between France and Italy culminated in the French government taking the extraordinary step of withdrawing its ambassador to Rome in February. On one level, this drôle de guerre is between two governments which hold dramatically different views of the...
When I mention that I am reading Robinson Jeffers, even cultivated and well-read people look bemused; the name seems obscure. By way of explanation, I borrow the closing words of the classic gangster film The Roaring Twenties: “He used to be a big shot.” Just how big Jeffers had once been is hard to convey...
One would think the only American fighter pilot to earn the Medal of Honor in World War II in Europe would be remembered and honored, or at least mentioned in history textbooks in high school and college. No such luck today. For those of us who grew up in the aftermath of the Second World...
What lies at the root of the abstractionism that I discussed last month, which afflicts the modern world like a mania, especially here in the United States? Walker Percy dubbed the phenomenon angelism, by which he did not mean that those who exhibit it have evolved to a state of moral purity but that we...
President Donald Trump’s predecessors have circumvented Congress before on issues the legislative branch had tried to stop. They have redirected resources appropriated by lawmakers. They have resorted to the same National Emergencies Act that Trump is invoking in order to build the Wall along the country’s southern border. None of their actions triggered a reaction...
Hold the presses! More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States. This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other. If this were 1969, the moon landing would be a smaller headline. And who came up with the scoop? None other than the New York Times, the paper that first told us that...
A few months ago I was on a long plane ride when something rather startling happened: Someone sitting near me was actually polite. He was in the seat immediately in front of mine, and before reclining he turned to look over his shoulder and asked—asked!—if I would mind if he leaned a little bit into...
My relationship with Barnes & Noble is fraught with emotion simply because it is a big bookstore, among other things. And I am one of those types—an inveterate reader—who is easily hooked. I was once embarrassed when a lady told me that she had caught herself reading soup-can labels: As one who had done the...
Today, a century after the close of the “war to end all wars,” the prospect of achieving what the U.N. and other such garrulous bodies call “global peace” seems ever more remote. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if only we could establish everywhere the right to equality before the law, freedom of...
Michael Jackson is the mirror of the children of liberal America, even though he is dead. Obsessed with their appearance, they keep hacking away at their features until they are unrecognizable as humans. Sexualized as pre-adolescents through pop culture, they fetishize their own children by exposing them to pop culture in equal or greater measure....
There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him. Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...
How can I be Me? Let Me count the ways . . . In 1976 New York published a lengthy essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” by the reporter and novelist Tom Wolfe, who died last year, aged 88. Wolfe argued that mass prosperity in the postwar era had erased the historical...
When I was in my middle teens I read all or most of Sinclair Lewis’s work. It seems impossible, but it is a fact nevertheless that Main Street will be a century old next year, and Babbitt in 2022. I took my copy of the latter from the shelf the other day (Signet Classic edition,...
The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (New York: Basic Books; 400 pp., $23.99). It is expected of an author that he say something new and big about someone or something new and big, even should it have been so for two years already. President Trump remains something new and big, though his detractors...
Washington never made any particular secret of its jaundiced view of Brexit as suggested succinctly by President Obama when he warned that Great Britain, if she voted to leave the European Union, would need to go to “the back of the queue” of countries wishing to cut trading deals with the United States. J’ai tiré...
Now here’s a headline: “Blackface, sexual assault scandals don’t appear to have tarnished Virginia’s image,” the Washington Post declared on March 3. The story referred to controversies surrounding each of the commonwealth’s three top statewide officials—all of them Democrats. Gov. Ralph Northam came under pressure to resign after the conservative website Big League Politics discovered...
In 2004, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, an attempt to define the growingly important but haphazardly applied concept of “populism.” He had an emotional as well as an academic interest, because “far-right” nationalism had enmeshed his own brother. His influential conclusion was that populism was an unlikable “thin ideology,” almost infinitely...
On Thursday January 17, news broke in the Netherlands that a Dutch journalist had been expelled from Turkey. Ans Boersma, 31, had been detained the day before in Istanbul when she applied to renew her residence visa. In a last-ditch attempt to help her, a group of her colleagues brought a lawyer to the police...
