Category: View

In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason.  For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...

For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work.  Not really.  Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States.  I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...

How do you make $100 million per day?  Goldman Sachs did it—and still does it.  It even brags about it.  Goldman’s net revenues for 2009 were over $45 billion.  Most of this—$34.37 billion—came from trading.  During the second and third quarters of 2009, Goldman made over $100 million per day on 82 out of 130...

The New York Times’ obituary for Michael Foot, who led the Labour Party in the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1983 and who died in March at the age of 96, quotes the following passage from a campaign speech Mr. Foot delivered that year: We are not here in this world...

Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan.  Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...

The Metropolitan Opera has a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, which premiered in New York City last New Year’s Eve.  I read the review by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times’ most competent music critic, who understands singing as well as he knows operatic literature.  Mr. Tommasini raved over the production, the work of the...

On September 10, 2009, Matthew Hoh resigned from his post as the senior State Department official in the Zabul Province of Afghanistan.  In his resignation letter, he wrote in part, I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. . . . Our forces, devoted and...

Stendahl begins his peculiar autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, with his alter ego standing at the summit of the Janiculum Hill, surveying the city of Rome, west to east.  It is October 16, 1832, and Brulard faces his cinquantaine in three months.  Fifty years, he thinks!  But Raphael’s Transfiguration has been admired for 250...

One long-standing hallmark of Western conservative thought is the emphasis on the rule of law.  Earlier generations of conservatives understood that, without such constraints, liberty would be imperiled and a free society would ultimately descend into tyranny.  As Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Even during the 20th century,...

“We need radical change,” Lord Turner, chairman of England’s Financial Services Authority, said recently.  “And parts of the financial services industries need to reflect deeply on their role in the economy, and to recommit to a focus on their essential social and economic functions, if they are to regain public trust.”  The British are engaged...

The recent passing of Mary Travers—who, with Peter and Paul, was years ago always intoning that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind—brought back some quaint memories of kumbaya moments, and the consoling thought that at least Mary Travers lived long enough to see her political vision fulfilled in the person of Barack...

None of us growing up in Atlanta in the 1940’s were under the delusion that we were equal.  We were aware of a myriad of differences that had nothing to do with race or gender.  Some were better football players.  Others were better baseball players.  Some could run faster.  Others were more witty, or better...

The phrase human dignity is as ubiquitous today in enlightened global discourse as human rights.  Indeed, the two are intimately connected, the first being regarded as a subset of the second, as in, “the right to human dignity.”  But dignity in this context is used abstractly and in a universal sense, rather than concretely and...

The intention of postmoderns to destroy real people, with their natural loyalties, traditional morality, and inherited cultural preferences, is the same everywhere.  Its specific manifestations may be different in the United States and Serbia—the homes of our two interlocutors and my good friends—but the underlying motivation is identical.  It is Christophobia, the incubator of countless...

“The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge, a few years before the Great Depression.  In the worst economic downturn since then, Barack Obama won the White House after a campaign in which he made it clear, to what might be described as populist delight, that he was not a friend to corporations.  In...

He had finally done it.  He had mastered the physics of time.  He was ready to visit the past. He had made his first fortune in U.S. Treasury bond futures in the early 1980’s.  Wall Street had thought that the Reagan tax cuts would drive up interest rates because of budget deficits.  But he knew...

Another of those alarming clashes between solid democratic values has arisen, as the Supreme Court has agreed to rehear arguments relating to Citizens United v.Federal Election Committee.  In the weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group and creator of an uncomplimentary documentary called Hillary: The Movie, had wished to broadcast...

The welfare state was born in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, a ploy of the famed Iron Chancellor designed to counter the electoral appeal of the rival Social Democrats.  Thus, social security was created in 1889 and eventually spread, under several guises, to many nations. Here, the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (Social Security)...

Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race.  Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt.  Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks.  The superiority...

According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence.  And it’s a good...

The trial was fixed.  The judge knew it.  The rancher had the town buffaloed.  The jury would deliver the verdict the rancher wanted. The judge was concerned that the rancher’s rowdies would use the verdict for a lynching.  The rancher didn’t want any more nesters around.  The nester’s wife was a good-looking woman, and the...

A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them.  Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task.  Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...

I have a picture pinned over my desk here in Brussels, a 1929 photograph—“obtained under great difficulty,” the caption says—of a man being executed by guillotine at 5 a.m. on an open street in France. The title of the picture is “Legacy of the French Revolution.”  I keep it because it is a modern link with...

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under ferocious attack for his alleged relationships with several women, including a teenage girl.  These stories are surfacing exactly when one aspect of his policy—the fight against illegal immigration, which was part of the government program endorsed by the majority of voters in the last general election—is starting...

“We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom.” —John XXIII Nestled in the foothills below Saddleback Mountain in “the O.C.” there is an abbey of priests and a small boarding school.  There is nothing there that would remind one of the lubricious television program that made the initials of Orange County, California, proverbial;...

“Rawhide” Andrews was a Texas Ranger.  He came to the force after it was reconstituted in 1874, the Rangers having been discredited in the years following the War of Yankee Aggression as an enforcement unit for carpetbaggers. Comanches were in decline from smallpox and cholera and from the near extinction of buffalo by hide hunters. ...

It seems that bipolarity is a significant element of human nature, mental as well as emotional.  Human beings tend toward extremes in both thought and feeling, never more than when the subject of either is the animal kingdom with which we share our world.  Most of mankind differentiates among animals as ferocious beasts, objects of...

“Another Crisis like this one and the West will be wiped out,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 1.  “Once we have overcome this Crisis, the question will be how can we return to a path of virtue as far as public debts are concerned.”  Of course, the first question is whether the West...

It’s Friday evening, and you have arrived at your local multiplex with your ten- and twelve-year-old boys and two of their very closest friends.  You’ve come to see the best movie $150 million can make.  You cannot remember just when, but it seems you idly mentioned to your wife earlier in the week that you...

In 1939, the year I was born, gasoline was ten cents per gallon.  A new car cost $700.  A new house cost $3,850, and the average rent was $28 per month.  Harvard tuition was $420 annually. A loaf of bread from the bakery was eight cents. Hamburger was 14¢ per pound, eggs were 19¢ per...

The Russian government has established a presidential commission charged with countering “attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history.”  The history it refers to is that of the 20th century, in which domestic and international crimes committed by the former Soviet Union played a salient and notorious role.  The Kremlin insists that the sacrifices made...