The realm of prophecy and prediction is a notoriously dangerous territory in which to venture if one takes things too seriously, but I hope you will forgive a light little wander into that domain. The question at hand is the rise and fall of nations. The period since the collapse of European Communism from 1989 to 1991 has witnessed a great … [Read More]

It is indicative of the disastrous social trends that began in the 1960s, that we are now faced with the most odious kind of snobbery, that of celebrity, namely that of Barbara Walters and her memoirs. The fact that someone taught her to act—her mother or her public school teacher—constitutes child abuse to the nth degree. This Walters woman is the … [Read More]

Good things come in pairs. In this case there are three, actually. Three books which set the record straight. Not the usual victor’s justice twaddle that we in the West have been swallowing these last 60 some odd years. The first is by Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who was among the first in his time to cast a skeptical eye … [Read More]

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]

When Modern Warfare and Demography Square Off, Demography Wins. What was the most important battle of the late 20th century? You could argue it was the one that took place on the southern border of Morocco on November 6, 1975. Of course, we’re not talking about another Stalingrad here. In fact, what happened that day isn’t usually called a battle at … [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]