Walk into any room full of Christian conservative donors, and someone will say, “Politics is downstream of culture.” Every head in the room will nod. Nothing is more entrenched as conventional wisdom among Christian conservatives. Like most truisms, this one is only partly true. As people change . . . . Continue Reading »
There has been a lot of teeth-gnashing over the many extreme, and extremely silly, things being said on the campaign trail this year. Few observers of this carnival of bad behavior have bothered to probe very deeply how we got here, however, and why Trump supporters, in particular, have not been . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s a full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump’s candidacy. Written with pungency, “The Flight 93 Election” was published on the Claremont Review of Books website under the name Publius Decius Mus, a fourth-century b.c. Roman consul whose heroic self-sacrifice in battle saved the day for . . . . Continue Reading »
Will the 2016 election be about foreign policy? And, if it is, can non-interventionist conservatives win that kind of election? Some think the answers to these questions might be “yes and yes.” I think that the answers are more likely to be “probably no and not yet.” Continue Reading »
We just had a revolution—a polite one. Continue Reading »
Mark Udall’s senatorial defeat might have been the sweetest victory for social conservatism on Tuesday. He organized his campaign around the theme that Republicans were hostile to women, and that his opponents would ban contraception—and all of this with a side order of abortion extremism. Udall’s defeat by Cory Gardner (and the mockery Udall has received across the political spectrum) might indicate that the Democratic “war on women” campaign tactic has outlived its usefulness. Maybe it has, but social conservatives should be careful to distinguish between Mark Udall’s war on women campaign, and the more effective (though still overrated) war on women campaign run by Barack Obama in 2012. Continue Reading »
I’m never more of a partisan than on election night. All my misgivings about the Republican Party dissolve and I become like a sports fan tabulating my team’s essential statistics. Then Wednesday arrives, and the spasm of partisan enthusiasm fades into a renewed realism. Continue Reading »
I wore black today. Black suit, black tie, and a black shroud over the Romney-Ryan sign in my yard. No, I do not think, contrary to countless heartfelt comments one sees on the conservative blogs today, that the republic died today. But make no mistake: something did die today. Obama voters, you . . . . Continue Reading »
Daniel Henninger is not the only columnist to note what the president has done to motivate evangelical Christians in this year’s election, but I like the way he writes about it. ” Romney’s Secret Voting Bloc ” is something of a miracle. “There and in other . . . . Continue Reading »
A funny thing happened on the way to last November’s elections. Pundits who throughout the summer had billed the elections as the first post-Webster “referendum on abortion” increasingly argued, as fall rolled around, that abortion had “faded” as a decisive issue for voters. Some of this . . . . Continue Reading »
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