In honor of the 2008-09 North American ski season, I give you the following rant. As of March 18, 2008, Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, Alta and Deer Valley in Utah, and Mad River Glen in Vermont were the last skiers-only resorts in North America. The next day, Taos Ski Valley opened up its slopes to snowboarders. Now only three … [Read More]

In Christopher Buckley’s now-famous account of his “firing” at the hands of Rich Lowry at National Review, Buckley implicitly belittled not just the conservative movement in general but National Review in particular. After revealing the circumstances of his NR column’s cancellation, Buckley summed up his father’s career as follows: My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, … [Read More]

Greetings patriot! Do you wish to do your duty for your country on November 4?  Well, then, just about the last thing you should do on that day is go to the polls and vote.  On the contrary, of all the things you could do this Election Day, voting is surely one of the most useless.  Mathematically, your vote only makes … [Read More]

The TV show Gossip Girl, now in its second season, chronicles the “scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite”—“elite” meaning private school kids and their families.  Replete with iphone-toting teenagers, haute couture and on-location filming, the show pretends to at least a surface verisimilitude. When it comes to underlying sociological realities, however, it offers nothing but the most fatuous distortions. For example: • … [Read More]

Not to be insulting, but people who write about politics are all suckers. Suppose for years you’ve been drinking a certain whiskey. Its producers then launch an ad campaign that “brands” the whiskey in a way that you don’t like—that associates it, say, with youth and libido rather than maturity and discernment. Does the ad campaign make you change your view … [Read More]

Dan McCarthy addresses one of the several questions I posed in my last post—“Is the conservative movement worth conserving?”–namely, “To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?” Dan responds that the movement hasn’t in fact promoted its … [Read More]

I resigned my membership in The Philadelphia Society, the prestigious fraternity of movement conservatives, a couple years ago, but as I continue to pay my wife’s dues, I still read the Society’s communications from time to time.  Evidently, the topic of TPS’s upcoming national conference is “How to Transmit the Legacy of the Great Conservative Thinkers of the 20th Century”—a topic … [Read More]

This is the second of two posts critiquing Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s new book, Grand New Party. This first can be found here. I wrote previously that “Douthat and Salam neither defend nor stick to a consistent theory of what motivates voters.”  At least three such theories appear in Grand New Party: 1. First, some voters collect political allegiances as … [Read More]

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have won near universal acclaim for their book, Grand New Party (albeit not from the editors of Taki’s Magazine—see here, here, and here). I trust, therefore, that they will not take umbrage at my criticisms, of which this will be the first of two installments. First, what is more of a complaint than a criticism, Grand … [Read More]

In case Barack Obama (or anyone else) cares to listen, I have a winning slogan for him. So far, his campaign themes—“Hope” and “Change you can believe in”—have alluded to his inspiring biography and personal wonderfulness. Obama, these slogans suggest, will uplift Americans to a higher, happier and more harmonious plane of existence. As “model-heiress” and Obama supporter Lydia Shaw writes … [Read More]