If we evaluate Sunday’s Ron Paul r3VOLution March according Kevin’s “Rules for Radicals,” then it comes out pretty well. “Rowdiness in moderation” must be some kind of conservative ideal, and the crowd didn’t disappoint, even if attendance (somewhere between 5000-10,000) might have been a bit less than some hoped. There was even a lollapoluzza element to the whole thing, which brought … [Read More]

Under Consideration: Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, Princeton University Press (2008), 358 pages.  Steven Teles set out to write a book explaining how conservatives in the law achieved stature and success and transformed a profession that had become monolithically liberal. What The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals, … [Read More]

Deterrence was profferred as a legitimate, noninterventionist solution to the problem of Iranian and other Third World nations’ nuclear weapons in the earlier discussion. Nuclear proliferation to the Third World in general is a problem because such countries are less likely to keep a tight hold on their nukes, rocked as they are by periodic coups, a culture of endemic bribery, … [Read More]

My Southern suspicion that New England is full of crazy people gained another exhibit for the prosecution last week.  The “Parade of Horribles” in Beverly, Mass., a Fourth of July tradition of grotesquerie that is exactly what it sounds like, featured several floats mocking the Gloucester “pregnancy boom” in which seventeen girls at one high school decided that sixteen was an … [Read More]

On July 3 the New York Times published a feature article by Patricia Cohen bearing the provocative title “The’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire.” It seems, according to this report that professors are beginning to view themselves as “moderates.” This underscores their distance from their predecessors of the late 1960s, when my own academic career was launched. Back then … [Read More]

I reported to registration to receive my official totebag, T shirt, and condoms. In the bustle, I was only able to grab three packs, but luckily, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy and NARAL were handing out prophylactics in the display area (unfortunately labeled “Screw the Drug War”). The Campus Progress National Conference had begun. Campus Progress is the Left’s answer … [Read More]

After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a “blank cheque” to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its dispute with Germany over Danzig, … [Read More]

The Iraq Campaign has more or less discredited the idea of preemptive war to stop the acquisition of nuclear weapons by unfriendly nations.  But does our unlucky situation in Iraq mean we should never use force to prevent nations such as Iran from getting nuclear weapons? Let me explore some paleoconservative heresies. Nuclear arms would make Iran an order of magnitude … [Read More]

Under Consideration: Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, Doubleday (2008), 244 pages.   Before drafting God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley planned on writing a definitive statement of his political and cultural philosophy—Revolt Against the Masses. According to Jeffrey Hart, who relates this anecdote in … [Read More]

I’m afraid that Pug’s Club “Turd of the Year” award went unanimously to the ghastly Andy Murray, he of the Centre Court primal screams and primate fist pumping. Perhaps his mother, who looks straight out of central casting of a Hollywood stage mum, and then some, should file his teeth down a bit and make him look less like Dracula. Better … [Read More]