Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...
Author: Daniel McCarthy (Daniel McCarthy)
Post
An Honest Reckoning
John le Carré could hardly imagine a better scenario: a spy-for-hire—once a servant of Her Majesty’s government, now selling his services in a foreign market—takes payouts from two masters simultaneously, as both a police informant and a political dirty-tricks man. He feeds political intelligence to the police, who use that innuendo to justify covert surveillance...
Post
Shoes to Fill
America is a nation of normal people who find themselves thrust into increasingly abnormal situations. Left-wing ideologues want to take a country of families, churches, and businesses and turn it into a playpen of radical identities. This is to be done in the name of fighting oppression, where apparently the most oppressive thing of all...
Post
Politicians #NeverLearn
Donald Trump’s first year as President is drawing to a close, and it’s been rough. The Republican Congress proved unequal to the task of repealing Obama Care. The border wall hasn’t been built. The administration is packed with generals and hawkish ideologues who push the President toward foreign intervention. A special prosecutor stalks the land,...
Post
The Politics of Peace
Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran. President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...
Post
The Terminal Playboy
When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy. He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds. Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue. Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...
Post
Needed: Hands and Nerves
Decades before Donald Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan heralded the themes that would put Trump in the White House. Yet despite all that lead time, Trump’s victory was still in one sense premature. In the interval between Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990’s and Trump’s victory last November, the Republican Party paid little heed...
Post
Nothing in the Middle
Have you noticed? Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen. CNN’s website headlined the story of one Joel Colindres, “This is the face of deportation: A dad with...
Post
Losers Double Down
The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November. This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban Atlanta. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running in Georgia’s Sixth District, raised over $23 million by...
Post
Desperate NeverTrumpers and the Constitution
A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president. Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him. The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...
Post
Progress Amid the Chaos
The foreign policy of the Trump administration remains a mass of contradictions, with the White House evidently divided among nationalists, pragmatists, and certain advisors who prescribe an ever expanding hegemony. These rivals have clashed in recent weeks over the question of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan—some 5,000 more to supplement the 8,400...
Post
Brinkmen Kim and Trump
Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim Jong-un. Where would be the profit in that? North Korea is not a cripple like...
Post
No Place for Humanity: Our Free-Chosen Dystopia
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well. And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...
Post
Donald Trump’s War—Or Sound and Fury?
Donald Trump’s decision to launch cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase last week has drawn deserved condemnation from his supporters—and won him strange new respect from John McCain and the mainstream media. Soon after the attack, the progressive media watchdog FAIR counted 18 op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street...
Post
The Politics of Life—and Politics
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
Post
Right Deserves Might
“A combination of St. Paul and St. Vitus.” —Ascribed to John Morley The world could use a few more volumes devoted to Grover Cleveland; it has little need for more books about Theodore Roosevelt. But if more there must be, at least the two under consideration here explore terrain not yet strip-mined. Patricia O’Toole begins...
Post
Enemies Right and Left
“Liberalism is too often merely a way of speaking.” —Oscar I. Janowsky Until the day he died in April 1964, John T. Flynn insisted that he was a liberal. Once, that self-designation had not been controversial. This was a man who, as a member of the New York City Board of Higher Education in the...
Post
Progress in the Sands
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley What sets Sands of Empire apart from the growing list of books scrutinizing the Bush administration’s foreign policy is its philosophical ambition. Where other authors have contented themselves with estimating the neoconservative influence on America’s strategic posture or describing the nation’s slouch...
Post
Rule Columbia!
“The Empire is peace.” —Napoleon III If the publishing industry has played any part in the supposed recent economic revival, it can, perhaps, thank George W. Bush. The President’s foreign policy has made it possible to sell thousands of books with the words empire or imperial in the title. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if...