One can surely make a reasonable argument that Sarah Palin was underqualified to be the next Vice President. Nevertheless, I argue here that the hyperventilated contempt shown for her by our cosmopolitan elites reveals a caricatured and ugly dismissal of the lives of ordinary Americans. It’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Niall Ferguson offers a sweeping historical explanation — the clearest and broadest I’ve seen — of the financial crisis, including a delicious (to me) critique of the arrogant "quants" (quantitative whiz-kids) who created a "Planet Finance" in the sky and led . . . . Continue Reading »
Our own Peter Lawler explains that, like Reagan’s victory in 1980, Obama’s "negative landslide" was based upon the repudiation of an incompetent Republican party as well as his success in presenting himself as intellectually temperate, politically moderate, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Ross , as often transpires, has blogged something of interest: [ . . . ] Obama’s "ironist’s temperament" doesn’t just make him a more interesting politician than your average baby-kisser: It has the potential to be crucial to his success as President. Mass democracy has . . . . Continue Reading »
Over at the Confabulum I’ve tried to continue rolling out my conceptual brief against ideology . Part of my contention there is that in democratic times the allure of ideology is the condensation of politics, religion, and culture into a single, concise, comprehensive doctrine. A political . . . . Continue Reading »
A possibility Helen doesn’t explore explicitly is that Obama’s broad but thin and vague popularity is in some significant measure the consequence of stale ideas on the right — or at least of the inability of the right to translate their ideas into practice. We should wonder more . . . . Continue Reading »
I know it’s a little immodest for me to offer a history lesson—for those of you who don’t know, I’m twelve years old —but I want to stop Conor from buying into a liberal version of history that’s just wrong. He links approvingly to this piece by Tim Fernholz: . . . . . . Continue Reading »
Immediately following Obama’s less than reassuring pledge to the world’s most famous plumber to "spread the wealth around" we’ve been treated to a shocking character assasination of a private individual and the careful if tedious parsing of Obama’s . . . . Continue Reading »
It seems that Conor Friedersdorf and I only ever have one fight: he tends to judge things (candidate, ideas, and political parties) strictly on their merits, and I always want to make it more complicated . From his post on Young Turkism in the pundit class: . . . had TS Elliot sent me "The . . . . Continue Reading »
The uncanny and unsettling distance between what seems and what is pops up again in David Brooks’s latest column . These are my bolds below: If you wanted to pick words to capture Patio Man’s political ideals, they would be responsibility, respectability and order. Patio Man moved to . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
