• The Quarterly Review
• Antiwar.com
• Eagle Forum
• Jihad Watch
• Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy
• New Criterion
• Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Chronicles Magazine
• Lew Rockwell
• The American Cause
• Vdare

Articles are sorted in descending order by date. To find articles based on keywords, use the search function above.

The recent decision by the California Supreme Court overturning a ban on gay marriage has, once again, thrust this issue into the malestrom of political debate, and, simultaneously, revived the sagging fortunes of groups on both sides. [Read More]

The history of libertarianism as a doctrine and an organized political movement is of interest these days on account of all the attention garnered by Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman known as “Dr. No,” in his quixotic yet attention-getting and surprisingly successful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Where do these libertarian types come from, and where are they going? Is their bid to restore respect for the Constitution in American political culture a passing phase, or a portent of things to come? Whether Dr. Paul fought a rear-guard action, or in fact launched the first wave of a continuing assault on the Welfare-Warfare Sate remains to be seen, but if the GOP is dragged down to a crushing defeat by the neocons' war and its economic consequences, then the Paulistas might have a fighting chance of taking back the Republican party for the heirs of Robert A. Taft and the Old Right. [Read More]

The final river of Yukio Mishima's life to swell from a stream into a rushing torrent was that of action, and it propelled him toward his fate. This was really, however, the river of ideology, which for Mishima was his own unique brand of Japanese nationalism: it might be called Japan’s version of paleoconservatism. He didn’t think of himself standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” Instead, he demanded that history must reverse course, and go back to that juncture where a wrong turn was taken. [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]

When Ayn Rand appeared at the blue-green podium, peering intently at us through reading glasses that seemed too big for her face, I thought, for a moment, that there must be some mistake. The woman who stood before us was short, with her dark hair swept impatiently back from her forehead in a page-boy haircut. She was wearing a severe suit that may have been fashionable at some point in the distant past, and looked to be in her late fifties. A wave of disappointment swept over me: where were Dagny Taggart’s “show-girl legs”? And where was Dagny Taggart? The woman standing on the stage resembled a Russian babushka who had somehow been diverted on her way to the Moscow market to pick up a sack of potatoes and instead had wandered, improbably, into the NBI auditorium. That visual impression, however, lasted only as long as it took her to begin speaking. [Read More]

The reality is that for Ron Paul to rule out a third-party run is a tragic error. Paul’s presidential campaign galvanized so much energy and enthusiasm that, at times, it mimiced the dimensions and depth of a real mass movement, that is, of a serious effort to recapture the GOP from the neoconservatives and inaugurate a new era on the Right. The Paul campaign ignited interest at both ends of the political spectrum, and drew in a broad array of activists and supporters who, despite their ideological diversity, showed remarkable cohesion and an amazing degree of self-organization. As a grassroots phenomenon, it has outpaced anything seen in the libertarian movement—or, indeed, on the far right side of the political spectrum–since the storied days of Barry Goldwater. The field has never been more inviting for a third-party candidate of the Right, as the man conservatives love to hate takes his place as the GOP standard-bearer in 2008. [Read More]

The hysteria that is energizing the campaign to smear Ron Paul and his supporters as “racist” is reaching a crescendo of viciousness, as the Beltway “libertarian” crowd revs up its motors for a righteous purge. Writing in the online edition of Reason magazine, David Weigel and Julian Sanchez aver that the whole brouhaha is rooted in a “strategy” enunciated by the late Murray N. Rothbard and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. designed to appeal to “right-wing populists." Reason, of course, in it’s new incarnation as the official organ of the libertarian movement’s aging hipsters and would-be “cool kids,” vehemently opposes reaching out to middle and working class Americans. Moreover, the decidedly “square” Dr. Paul—a ten-term Republican congressman from Texas, no less, and a pro-life country doctor of decidedly conservative social views—was and is anathema. [Read More]

Within the conservative movement of the time, such as it was, the main appeal was a visceral anti-Communism, which generally appeared in two varieties. The McCarthyite “enemy within” version, practiced with alacrity by such outfits as “Counterattack,” which put out the infamous Red Channels pamphlet that purportedly exposed “Communist-inspired” propaganda in the media, and the advocates of “rollback,” who concentrated on pushing a foreign policy that would, in effect, declare war on the Soviet Union and seek to free the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain. [Read More]

Members of the Old Right like Murray Rothbard were “apostles of discord” because they challenged and opposed all those Good Things that non –“extremists” embraced, like the Welfare State, the United Nations, and the liberal-collectivist shibboleths of the time, which were indeed held as sacred by both parties and all “respectable” commentators. [Read More]

I had grown up a conservative, weaned on National Review, the “fusionism” of Frank Meyer, and the bedrock constitutionalism of Barry Goldwater... As far as I was concerned, the libertarian movement was founded at the 1969 convention of Young Americans for Freedom ,where a libertarian burned his draft card and a fistfight with the “trads” led to the founding of a separate libertarian youth group. [Read More]