Under Consideration: Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, Natan Sharansky (with Shira Wolosky Weiss), PublicAffairs (2008), 259 pages. After Jesus Christ, Natan Sharansky is George Bush’s favorite philosopher. In early 2005, around the time of his second inaugural, the president praised Sharansky—ex-prisoner of the Soviet Gulag, former Israeli cabinet minister, and crusader for human rights—in effusive terms.  Sharansky’s book … [Read More]

Rear-view Mirror Conservatism We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future.                                          -Marshall McLuhan Dan Larison’s recent praise of George Grant reminds me of the reason that originally attracted me, as an undergraduate reader, to … [Read More]

Between the warring camps vying for ownership of the true “American conservatism,” a remarkable consensus has emerged around the status of Abraham Lincoln and his legacy. In the conservative house divided, almost everyone agrees that the president was the prophet of democratic imperialism and that his war with the South was a mere dress rehearsal for global crusades for democracy which … [Read More]

Christians on the right are used to witnessing attacks on their faith from atheistic leftists. Ever since the highly influential “cultural Marxists” of the Frankfurt School emigrated to America and proceeded to spew their venom onto bourgeois Christianity from the 1950s onwards (as Paul Gottfried has documented in The Strange Death Of Marxism), it has become de rigeur for the … [Read More]

Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, Double Day, 336 pages.  It is always risky to write the obituary of neoconservatism, despite the now fashionable view that this is an idea whose time is finally gone. As Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrates in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, the neoconservatives have always been … [Read More]