Last week, while CPAC was winding down its annual conference, one of its stellar speakers, Jonathan Krohn, was honored with an interview on FOX news. This much-touted interviewee, who is now being compared to Joe the Plumber, is only 14 years old, and he bears a striking resemblance to my 13 year-old grandson Joshua. For about a moment, my wife thought … [Read More]

Conservatism is people! That conservatives have already soured on Obama and his big spending agenda is understandable, but in flocking to cheer a very charismatic, yet non-specific and vague political figure in Rush Limbaugh, CPAC 2009 wasn’t different from any Obama rally in 2008. Limbaugh used to complain that liberals value “style over substance.” Today, apparently so do conservatives, as even … [Read More]

Under Bush, the conservative movement became what it is - a mere tool of the Republican Party. In the past, there were many on the Right who wrote books, promoted philosophies and endorsed policies they hoped might eventually become political and cultural realities, and they often considered the GOP the better party to help implement a more conservative politics. Today, we … [Read More]

I have never liked New Year’s Eve. Americans might have voted for “change” recently, but I’ve rarely desired it, always finding the same-old, same-old to be as bright or brighter than any new horizons. As a child on New Year’s Eve, when everyone was looking toward a better new year, I was always wondering what was wrong with the last one. … [Read More]

I’ve avoided reading, let alone commenting on, the various post-election analyses of “where is conservatism headed?” or “what went wrong?” symposiums, because in my old age I’m becoming more intolerant of people who know so little that they don’t even know that they know nothing of the subject they’re discussing. Of course, the post-election symposium over at National Review didn’t involve … [Read More]

The concept of “culture” permeates many aspects of our lives.  A ‘culture’ search for recent articles on Google News returned no less than 70,000 hits.  One hears of high-brow culture (or used to), low-brow culture, American culture, black culture, white culture, gay culture, cultural homogeneity, cultural wars, and, more recently because of immigration, cultural assimilation. Historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that without … [Read More]

The election of Illinois senator Barack Obama (D) to the presidency confirms a simple truth: when the economy goes into a recession during the last two years of a presidential term, the party in the White House is replaced. That’s an adage I learned several years ago from the astute Indiana economist Bill Styring, and it has proven true over the … [Read More]

As Tom Piatak discusses over at Chronicles, David Frum hastened to the defense of his fellow-neocon Anne Applebaum, the historian of the Soviet gulags and the current wife of the current Polish foreign minister. It seems that NR dared to rebuke this lady for her enthusiastic backing of Obama. Frum complained about “how the house of conservatism has shrunk” if it … [Read More]

More tragic than the rubble of a raped and looted city, than the cancer-ridden face we knew when it was lovely, is the crumbling of a once impressive mind. In some ways it is much sadder, as it makes the observer think back and question the intellectual qualities he once thought he espied there. I haven’t read Jeff Hart in … [Read More]

Douglas A. Jeffrey and Claremont Review both deserve to be congratulated for violating the imperial ban that the neoconservative mafia has imposed on my book Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. Unlike National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, and other bona-fide members of the neocon agitprop empire, Jeffrey and his publication have dared to speak … [Read More]