Perhaps the greatest compensation for trading cramped digs in Rome for a spacious house in the U.S. is that I have my beagles back. Susie and Franz-Josef are out back now, sniffing the trails of long-scampered squirrels, and howling merrily for blood. One advantage of living in New Hampshire instead of New York is that “out back” refers to the spacious … [Read More]

How hated are the neocons?—When even sports writers are on your case, you know the peasants with pitchforks can’t be far behind. From a piece headlined “Are the Mariners the Neocons of Baseball?”: “Should we be worried the Mariners are baseball’s equivalent of the Bush Administration? Fiscally undisciplined with negligible positive returns? Check. Marketed as veteran leadership despite any veterans … [Read More]

During the height of the globalization age in the late 1990s, many leading Zeitgeist watchers were celebrating the rise of the “New Cosmopolitans,” a term coined by business reporter G. Pascal Zachary. A new civilization was being born out of the increasing flow of money, products, ideas, and most important, people, across the borders of decaying nation-states. In this post-modern globalized … [Read More]

NEW YORK--So there I was, at the Waverly Inn, Graydon Carter’s little toy that is the hottest ticket in the Big Bagel since two years, when the booth next to mine filled up with young people, all of them scruffy and dressed like the homeless, their girls rather plain and some of them even ugly. Par for the course, I thought … [Read More]

Conservatism is sometimes criticized as unprincipled, relativistic, or contradictory.  This criticism stems from the very nature of conservatism; it is a philosophy rooted primarily in attitudes about change, so its starting point is always a given society, as it is found in all of its contradictions.  Conservatism recognizes how the various goals of civilized, social life are often at odds with … [Read More]

Should pro-lifers keep citing Margaret Sanger’s scathingly racist statements, and her program of eugenics—which directly influenced Hitler, and led to laws in a dozen or so American states forcibly sterilizing or even castrating thousands of the “unfit” who flunked primitive I.Q. tests? Good question. What matters most is whether such a rhetorical attack works at undermining liberal and non-white support for … [Read More]

The road to the White House often intersects the path of rapidly moving projectiles.  Bravely volunteering to put themselves and their horses, naval vessels and airplanes into the way of arrows bullets , cannonballs torpedoes, and the odd destroyer launched Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Bush 41 into the Oval Office ,and Senator McCain’s close encounter with a … [Read More]

Ben Stein’s movie Expelled has generated lots of commentary, most of it negative.  Many have claimed that it is obscurantist and hostile to science, a veritable first shot in a wider war against knowledge.  Despite employing the same type of techniques that garnered Michael Moore an Oscar (and much critical acclaim), it has a 9% positive rating at rottentomatoes.com, the sort … [Read More]

I thank Dr. Gottfried for his response, and I appreciate the point that he and several commenters have made.  From the reaction to the last post, I see that I must not have been sufficiently clear about what I meant.  National consciousness did exist prior to the rise of nation-states, and indeed was the basis for the cultivation of nationalist feeling … [Read More]