Category: Web

Many Americans would be horrified at the thought of discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini as anything but moral and political antipodes: democrat versus dictator, peacemaker versus aggressive bully, good versus bad. Fifty-five years of bipartisan hagiography have placed FDR in the pantheon of American saints, roughly at number two between Abraham Lincoln and...

I live in Italy—in Venice, which I have on occasion described as Italy’s Italy—for the deceptively simple reason that it is the only place in the world where I do not feel the urge to play roulette after dinner. I have actually thought long and hard about this opening sentence of mine, trying to decide...

In the United States, liberation from foreign domination and liberation from the past (the republican and democratic features of government) were largely the result of the American Revolution, which was spontaneous in origin, successful, moderate in its outcome, and—above all—supported by a considerable part of the population. This fortunate historical experience may lead many Americans...

Foreign policy, the elites of both Beltway parties tell us, is not an issue in this election year. By that, they mean it is off the table, a matter already decided upon and settled by those who know what is best for America. So they, and their media auxiliaries, redirect our attention away from foreign...

“At present, the United Nations closely resembles the American nation under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789). The inherent problems with that system demonstrated the need for ‘a more perfect Union,’ which was duly accomplished with the signing of the United States Constitution. And just as Confederation led to true American federalism, so the UN is...

November 9, 1989, marked the end of the old politics and the old alignments; on that day, as the Berlin Wall fell, so did the political categories and alliances of half a century. The end of the Cold War meant a lot more than the end of communism as a viable ideology. It meant more...

Last year, President Clinton, who has rarely found a conflict that lie did not want to join, complained to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Congress was cutting foreign aid, “the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in the first place.” He threatened to veto the foreign-assistance appropriation hills passed by...

Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...

I like reading about hate crime: It is such a cheering feature of American life. And while I am always happy to see the excellent news about this kind of offense—ever-rising numbers, more and more crimes in ever-broader areas of the country—I wish we could get those statistics even higher. The reasons for mv satisfaction...

For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...

As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I have spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop-fiction lovers. I have steadily despaired of those who read Stephen King, Terry C. Johnston, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, and...

A writer, asked during a literary party what her new novel was about, turned on the questioner with an expression combining irritation, indignation, and pity, and replied, “My novels aren’t about things!” Some time later, this same writer would denounce Stephen King in print for hogging the marketplace and for his alleged role in censoring...

With Republicans increasing social spending and Democrats upping military outlays, Washington is devoid of serious debate over any important issue. Despite the President’s attacks on GOP “isolationism,” both parties largely favor foreign intervention. As a result, America finds itself entangled in almost every international conthet and potential conthet: Bosnia, the Caucasus, China, Colombia, East Timor,...

Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric, if not utterly insane or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream.” The trouble is that normal people do not take madmen seriously enough. This works to the advantage of politicians—an inherently insane breed—and their subjects’ attitude of “they can’t be serious” allows them...

Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...

A television ad: Single girl “Heather” has come to be videotaped for a dating service. Haltingly, she blurts out facts about herself—she’s got a Lab, a “great” job, an “out-of-control shoe fetish”—while sipping the diet soda which is supposedly the raison d’être of the ad. The interviewer comments, “Sounds like a pretty good life.” Taking...

How could I possibly know as much as I do about popular entertainment? I mean, I almost never go to the movies anymore. The big multiplexes annoy me with the stink of their sprays, their even more vexing segmentation of the audience, and their usurious popcorn prices. At home, I have no time for television,...

DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...

“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...

Religion is a very sturdy creature. For two centuries, various atheist regimes have tried to eliminate religious practice in their societies and, without exception, have ended up restoring the forms of the old worship, but with newer and far lamer excuses. The French revolutionaries who tried to free their subjects from the curse of Christianity...

“To be merely queer is no achievement, but to be brilliantly individualistic is a fine art which Geneva brought to perfection,” wrote Warren Hunting Smith, who died last November at the age of 93. Mr. Smith lived something of a double life. He was an editor of the Yale Edition of the Horace Walpole correspondence,...

What is individualism? John Stuart Mill answered this question with a theory of rights. Mill looked for a “simple” theoretical principle that could distinguish the liberty of the individual from that of the state. Not only is there no such principle, but we miss the full character of individualism if we try to grasp it...

When I was growing up, the nuclear-war nightmare and other end-of-the-world scenarios weighed heavily on filmmakers’ minds. From radioactive giant lizards trashing Tokyo to the ironic Planet of the Apes, from On the Beach to Dr. Strangelove, the movies made it clear that our social order was on the edge of extinction. The Terminator series...

A few years ago, before my son was born, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at the country house of a moderately hip American investment banker. There were about 20 of us to dinner that evening, with all the usual cosmopolitan strains amply represented. Boring and predictable as the whole business was, by about...

In his article “A Just and Necessary War,” published in the New York Times on May 25, President William Jefferson Clinton summarized the case for his war against the Serbs. He elaborated on his “vision,” arguing that the bombing of Serbia was the response to “the greatest remaining threat to that vision; instability in the...

If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...

In The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his trilogy on Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Friedrich von Hayek confessed that, “as a result of long endeavors to trace the destructive effect which the invocation of ‘social justice’ has had on our moral sensitivity,” he had “come to feel strongly that the greatest service”...

As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...

At the Alamo, Davy Crockett either: A. Died while swinging old Betsy; B. Came radically disconnected when he torched the powder magazine; C. Surrendered to the Mexicans, who tortured, then killed him, along with six other Anglo survivors of the siege. Does it matter immensely which of these versions of Crockett’s death commends itself to...

The 46-year-old veteran frontiersman lay in bed, desperately ill. He was suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound that he had received in a fight. But duty called. The state legislature asked him if he would lead an army of volunteers to engage the rampaging Red Stick Creeks. Though scarcely able to sit up...

On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....

Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...

Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy. Call them what we will—fiends or psychopaths, ghouls or serial killers—this type is by no means new to the later 20th century, however much the...

Family policy is strangely absent from debates in Europe (the word “family” plays no part in the treaty of European Union signed at Maastricht). In France, however, it has become the object of numerous controversies. From these debates, several lessons can be drawn which would enable policymakers to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past....