Arthur C. Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, had the most concise response to the daunting challenge faced by conservatives in the wake of the recent re-election of President Obama: President Obama won re-election because his message of resentment against the rich for failing to pay their “fair share” resonated with millions of people […]
Restoring Constitutional Government
For most of the past 100 years we have been engaged in an intense debate on the purposes of government, particularly the concept of constitutional government. This debate originated earlier in the aftermath of the Civil War, continued through the growth of an industrial America, was energized by the Progressive movement of the early 20th […]
The House Divided
Two fundamentally and diametrically opposed interpretations of the origin of American rights: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted […]
Timely Papal Advice (Published August 2011)
Incidentally, consistent with Tom Sowell’s ideas on the constrained vs. the unconstrained visions outlined in his book, here is an appropriate quote from recent remarks by Pope Benedict: “The cry for the large scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast, limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passions of morality […]
A Very Instructive Conversion (Published August 2011)
I never thought much about the celebrated playwright David Mamet until the news broke that the long time reliable patron of the left had “converted” to conservatism. The interesting facts to me were the source of the ideas that influenced his conversion, and sure enough there were some of my heroes. Mamet says that he […]
Islamic Voices in the Wilderness
Several months ago, David Brooks raised the question as to whether or not the events of the past year in the Middle East, which seem to represent a yearning for freedom on the “Arab street”, truly undermine the ideas expressed by Samuel Huntington in his landmark 1993 essay, “The Clash of Civilizations” and his book […]
A Discussion We Should Have
Hats off to Congressman Peter King for conducting hearings on the risks of domestic infiltration of radical Muslim jihadists. We have for too long deferred this conversation, and it shouldn’t be and isn’t about intolerance or discrimination, for Americans of all people do not need to be lectured about tolerance–our very creed is grounded in […]
The Last Bastion of Multicultural Mythology
First, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy who denounced the philosophy of multiculturalism as a failure, and finally the most ringing critique of all from British Prime Minister David Cameron who, in a recent speech to the Munich Security Conference, not only denounced it, but put the issue squarely on […]
“The Unhealthy Soul of Liberalism”
The quote in the title is from National Review magazine and I thought it appropos to the knee-jerk reaction across the board in the liberal establishment to the Tucson shooting rampage by the deranged, drug-addled kook Jared Lee Loughner. I suppose that Richard Hofstadter is credited with beginning the current genre with his “The Paranoid […]
No Labels or No Convictions?
I am constantly bemused by the very large crowd of political activists who wants us all to “just get along” or “get things done” or drop the partisanship or avoid “going negative” in policy or electoral debates. My sense is that most of this comes from the pragmatic, “whatever works” people who are only casually […]