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“It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.” —Aristotle Here Lies Edward Coke, Knight of Gold, of Imperishable Fame, Spirit, Interpreter, and Inerrant Oracle of the Law, Discloser of its Secrets—Concealer of its Mysteries, Thanks Almost Alone to Whose Good...

In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency.  He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth.  Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten.  Time has moved on, and...

The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age.  The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...

In his latest book, Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan argues that hubris, ideology, and greed are among America’s deadliest enemies.  Hubris led to overreach.  Hegemonic neoconservative ideology turned most of the world against the United States.  And free trade has become a no-think cult that permits a greedy few to destroy America’s economic position for...

Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892.  They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God” were not added until 1954.  But they...

        “An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...

A prophet and a polemicist, David Gelernter displays anything but a light touch in this attack on “imperial academia” and what it has wrought.  Like most prophets, Gelernter the polemicist hopes to be proved wrong.  Perhaps, with our culture dismantled and the “Obama­crats” in charge, the contest is over—game, set, and match.  Tennis was once...

The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally,...

Sixty-five years after the last guns ceased firing on the last Pacific atoll, Britons of all political persuasions are still wallowing in tepid World War II nostalgia. For Atlanticists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals, the war was a great Anglosphere achievement, a landmark en route to social mobility plus mercantilism.  For nationalists and romantics, there is...

“Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” —Acts, 20 The Big Board’s 508-point market meltdown was investigated by presidential commission, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges. Each of these bodies concluded that stocks fell because they were already much too high....