As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot discern, a riveting new history recalls times when Americans fought for vital national interests. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent is Robert Merry’s brilliant biography … [Read More]

One of the wheezes I get from my leftist friends in Berkeley is how highly evolved their sense of morality is, as if 21st-century Berkeley were some New Jerusalem of higher moral thought. These are folks who calibrate their exquisitely sensitive moral barometers with a protractor made from renewable soy plastic, a straight edged icon with Germaine Greer‘s photograph in it, … [Read More]

A once prominent name has been erased from the history of the American Right after World War II. Readers of National Review in the late 1950s and early ‘60s would have found it difficult to miss the contributions of Revilo P. Oliver, among the most frequent book reviewers for the magazine. Oliver, who taught at the University of Illinois and read … [Read More]

Having just seen the film Julie and Julia, based on a book by Julie Powell and a screen play by Nora Ephron, I’ve certain unanswered questions about some of the historical details that went into the plot. Of the two main characters, the more interesting by far is the longtime interpreter of French cuisine for Americans, Julia Child. A sympathetic maternal … [Read More]

I write these words on September 3, 2009, seventy years to the day since Britain and France declared war on Germany—an occasion observed, if not exactly celebrated by the leaders and opinion-makers of the West, as the beginning of “the good war.” The War Party just loves WWII because it’s the one war where all agree we had no choice but … [Read More]

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the … [Read More]

Under Discussion: Critchlow, Donald T, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, Harvard University Press (2007), 368 pages. In his new history of the conservative movement, Donald Critchlow retells a story that should be quite familiar by now: Modern American conservatism, from its inception in the 1950s, was an intellectual synthesis of the classical liberal tradition, emphasizing individualism … [Read More]

Pat Buchanan and I have some differences–some major differences. He is a Catholic; I am a Protestant. He is a conservative; I am a libertarian. He is a protectionist; I am a free-trader. He has disparaged Wal-Mart; I spend most of my money there. He believes Alexander Hamilton was one of the greatest of the Founding Fathers; I much prefer Thomas … [Read More]

In declaring secession illegal, and the U.S. a consolidated state, Abraham Lincoln enacted the first income tax, the first draft, supported internal improvements and nationalizing banks. Such centralizing, socialistic and militaristic restructuring of America was certainly more comparable to the fascism that defined Hitler’s Germany than the agrarian-based economies and loose-knit state militias that defined the Confederate States of America. … [Read More]

In contribution to Takimag from last summer, Austin Bramwell asked “Why are movement conservative intellectuals so obsessed with refuting positions (e.g., that the United States is an inherently “liberal” regime) that nobody has actually believed in fifty years?” Those few, we band of brothers, who read the piece sighed and muttered to ourselves, “Well, because so many people keep on asserting … [Read More]