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Conservatives Lose Their Word

Commentary by , July 30, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Death of the Tea Party The Tea Party movement of ten years ago is now comprehensively dead. How do we know that? Because Republicans and Democrats in Congress just got together on a budget deal that approves deficits in excess of $1 trillion forever—at a time […]

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Declaring Independence from Independence

Commentary by , July 21, 2019

The big question about the impact of Donald Trump on the Republican Party is: will he be an aberration, a temporary departure from the normal rhetorical style and ideological composite of late-20th-Century conservatism—or will he usher in a “new normal,” a new baseline for what the party stands for and what it will tolerate? We’re […]

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Political Chaos Theory

Commentary by , July 18, 2019

“Chaos theory,” at least in the popular version, is the study of unstable systems that can rapidly reach a tipping point where massive and radical change occurs—the point at which a seemingly stable equilibrium careens toward dangerous extremes. Both major political parties experienced a chaos theory moment over the weekend, in which the balance we […]

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Fascism with Communist Slogans

Commentary by , July 10, 2019

Ayn Rand once predicted that we were going to end up with “a fascist system with communist slogans.” This has been going through my mind as I’ve been watching the Democratic Party primary contest. No, it’s not quite fascism, not yet, nor is it quite communism (except maybe for Bernie). Yet most of the Democratic […]

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Gem-Flecked Rubbish

Commentary by , July 10, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. In Defense of “Safe Spaces” For a movement obsessed with “safe spaces,” the left sure doesn’t want anybody to have one. I posted a little while ago about a bizarre leftist campaign to purge political wrongthinkers from the realm of knitting, of all places. Now the website […]

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A Fascist System with Communist Slogans

Commentary by , June 20, 2019

The Search for Sanity, Part 2 How far out of hand has the Democratic Party’s nomination contest gotten? I think The Onion pretty much sums it up: “Media Urged Not to Release Names of Any More Presidential Candidates in Effort to Prevent Copycats.” “When a person launches a bid for president and then receives widespread […]

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Tanker War II

Commentary by , June 16, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Tanker War II Back in the late 1980s, the US got dragged into the Tanker War, an offshoot of the Iran-Iraq War in which Saddam Hussein foolishly declared war on Iranian shipping, only to discover Iraq is way more vulnerable to a naval blockade. The war on […]

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“A One-Man Smoot-Hawley”

Commentary by , June 7, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. A One-Man Smoot-Hawley President Trump’s trade war combines the three things he likes best: fear of foreigners, posturing about being “tough,” and the capricious exercise of unilateral power. So there is no reason to think he is ever going to end it. That’s the big takeaway from […]

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The God That Failed First

Commentary by , June 4, 2019

On Friday, I sent out an overview of Sohrab Ahmari’s attack on conservative “liberalism”–a word he is using in its correct sense, unfortunately. That piece is now up at The Bulwark. But there is another aspect of that story that I wanted to delve into a little more deeply, which is the brief but dramatic […]

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The Green Leap Forward

Commentary by , May 17, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The People Does Not Know What It Wills I’ve been loosely following the odd failure of Brexit–Britain’s exit from the European Union. Here’s the best political cartoon summing this up, which anyone who has ever owned a cat will understand. I am in favor of Europe having […]

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