Tocqueville’s warning about the Democrats
Cassandra was a Trojan princess with the gift of prophecy — or the curse. For while she could foresee the…
The liberal-conservative tug of war for the GOP
For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is…
What conservatives lack
A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely…
This election was no loss for Trump
If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms,…
Life after liberalism
Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of…
Brave new wombs
Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take…
Liberalism gave us this hard new right
The future of conservatism will look like Friedrich Nietzsche meets Beavis and Butt-Head if things continue the way they have been going. As…
How conservatives concede the culture
Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every…
The next chapter in American foreign policy
The new year begins a new chapter in American foreign policy. For the first time since 2001, we are not…
Who won the Cold War, anyway?
Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific…
The age of entropy
Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is…
The vanishing presidency
Joe Biden is beginning to feel like an ex-president after only nine months in office. The last two Democrats to occupy…
The War on Terror is a war of religion
Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbor. World War Two…
Who lost Afghanistan?
America’s longest war draws to a bloody end. As the pullout deadline approaches, the probability of more atrocities like the…
The last war for democracy
Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to…
The Democrats should investigate themselves for insurrection
For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not…
Donald Rumsfeld succeeded at everything — so why did he fail in the end?
What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s…
Is J.D. Vance the right man for the right?
J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential…
Biden’s party is over
Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of…
The strange death of the Democrats
The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won…
The Republican party has taken over Donald Trump
Forty minutes into Donald Trump’s remarks at CPAC, I’d formed a conclusion. Donald Trump hasn’t just taken over the Republican…
Rush Limbaugh, conservative rebel
‘The cutting edge of societal evolution.’ That was one of Rush Limbaugh’s catchphrases in the 1990s, and it was an…
The death of the Republican right has been greatly exaggerated
As Donald Trump goes on trial in the Senate, the Republican party faces the possibility of a crack-up. Trump will…
What does Trump want now? Revenge — and a second term
The figure of the ex-president is one of the most endearingly republican features of American politics. He who was the…
America’s Yeltsin moment
The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The…
