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There was a time, roughly between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, when the paleoconservatives looked like an insurgent force. In 1992, they found in Pat Buchanan a powerful presidential contender, and one who listened to their advice. The paleoconservatives and the paleolibertarians had patched up old disputes and come together in the John Randolph Club, a group whose meetings in Washington drew journalistic dignitaries, including but by no means limited to Buchanan. At one such gathering on Jan. 18, 1992, Murray Rothbard gave legendary speech in which he famously envisioned the “repealing the twentieth century." The paleos were insurgent. But eventually the weaknesses of the paleo side eventually came to show: excruciatingly limited funding, exclusion from the national media, vilification as “racists” and “anti-Semites,” and finally, strife within their own ranks. In retrospect, this was all predictable, although for me it was hard to grasp how totally the fall came when it did. [Read More]

The fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War was marked by a deluge of retrospective commentary, much of it focused on the past: how we got into this conflict and how it has been conducted. Fine, it is always appropriate to assess lessons learned. But why and how we got into Iraq and what choices could have been made differently are not central to when and how we get out. Washington loves to exaggerate differences in nuance into appearing as major and substantive differences—“My opponent sees six eggs, but I say there are half a dozen”—but the difference between the McCain and Obama positions is largely one of emphasis rather than degree. Language in one may appeal to neoconservatives, in the other appear to concede to liberal sentiments, but when one puts campaign rhetoric aside, the fundamentals are largely the same. The Iraq “debate” now largely recycles the same ground, and given these parameters, it is not surprising that there is not much creative thinking among Washington politicians about what to do next in Iraq. We will continue to meander in Iraq—and continue to bleed in terms of lives and treasure—until we have a serious debate, not about the Iraq we would like to see, but the Iraq we are prepared to live with. [Read More]

How did Matt Welch, who knows nothing about libertarianism, ever get in the position of becoming editor of Reason, the emblematic libertarian magazine? It is a position, after all, that has a bit of history to it, one that covers the life span of the modern libertarian movement from its very inception. It is a position, therefore, of some honor, one that has been a bit tarnished in recent years, and yet not indelibly damaged until recently. Surely Welch has accomplished exactly this, however, with his laughably ignorant attempt to slander Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul as “racists” – and not only that, but to discredit an entire argument and way of looking at race relations and politics that differs significantly from his culturally leftish version of political correctness. [Read More]

After the 1964 election a book appeared damning Conservatism’s debut as a “brute assault on the entire intellectual world” and charging, “Republicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy.” This withering critique of the politics of Senator Goldwater and his spokesman Ronald Reagan came not from Bill Moyers, but a recently graduated pair of Republican Harvard roommates, stalwarts of The Ripon Society, who, like some of the liberal democrats who applauded their book, have been flung though a sort of political time warp to land on the anti-intellectual end of the neoconservative spectrum. Bruce Chapman is now The Discovery Institute's President, and George Gilder its preeminent Senior Fellow, together leading the Seattle group in a metaphysical assault on everything that smacks of materialism. Though founded with a Reaganite focus on cutting-edge technology policy and the electronic revolution, Discovery has morphed away from futurism and libertarian economics—it began as a spinoff of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute and become the bane of scientific modernity, waging culture war on everything from Darwin to Einstein to stem-cell biotech and quantum indeterminacy, now even dark matter. [Read More]

Ukraine has known much darkness. And the long, sinister night of the twentieth century continues to cast shadows deep and wide. At this unique university, however, God’s light shines brightly, showing how wonderful that culture is where minds and hearts are formed in Christ. [Read More]

With memories still slick from the worst blood-letting in history, followed by the less dramatic horrors of the Soviet “peace,” the modern-day evil I witnessed wasn’t the worst thing ever to have happened in the city of Lviv, western Ukraine. But it surely was the offspring of the grossly satanic events of the preceding century. In this neighborhood marred by old evils, a stodgy woman fumbling up the street precipitated a new nightmare. [Read More]

The antiwar, pro-life Right--including Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and others who've opposed the Iraq War--doesn’t fit the narrative that hawks and neocons have built over the past six or seven years. What is that narrative? Essays by Joseph Bottum in First Things and James Hitchcock in the Human Life Review reveal the outline: neocons want to co-opt pro-lifers by convincing them that the bloodshed involved in wars of choice is not inconsistent with an ethic of life that rejects abortion and euthanasia [Read More]

On Saturday, March 8, 2008, President George W. Bush vetoed a congressional bill that would have explicitly banned interrogation techniques like waterboarding. In doing so, Bush cemented his worthiness of impeachment. The impeachment power allows Congress to keep the other two branches from grasping at powers that the Constitution gives to the Legislative Branch. Congress is described in Article I of the Constitution, and its structure was the chief issue in the Philadelphia Convention. Why? Because in a republic, it is to be the most important branch. [Read More]

Is the Surge working—really? Sure, it’s working fine, just like my sister’s car. I had to drop her off at the garage where they were looking over her Ford Probe. It’d been overheating since she bought it, and there was something wrong with the alternator, too. But she didn’t have the money to fix it so she asked the mechanic, “Can’t I just keep leaving the heater on and adding water and using my battery charger?” The mechanic blinked a couple times and said, “Yeah, you could do that….” Meaning, “You could, if you want to drive around sweating, wait for the charger to power up when you’re late for work, and generally ruin your life for the sake of a hopeless junker." That’s the best answer I can give on the Surge: if you’re willing to go on throwing away men and money to prop up a lost cause, then yeah, it’s working great! Just like my sister’s dumb techniques; they kept the car on the road all right, but she'd have been way better off just junking it, which she ended up doing anyway. [Read More]

James Webb was once the great white hope of the paleoconservatives. A little over a year into his first term, Jim Webb so far looks like something else entirely: a paleoconservative Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan always had many admirers on the right, especially among the neoconservatives. But in the Senate, he was a standard-issue liberal voting the Democratic Party line. Will Webb also roll over and play party regular? Washington has a way of taming mavericks and draining people of everything that makes them interesting. Steve Sailer once referred to "the Joe Liebermans and Daniel Patrick Moynihans who talk like Irving Kristol but vote like Walter Mondale." Webb writes like Pat Buchanan but votes like Harry Reid. [Read More]