By Sean Gabb On Wednesday the 13th April 2011, two men, James Bull and Jonathan Williams, kissed each other in the John Snow public house in Soho. Apparently, they were then asked to leave by a member of staff who called their act “obscene.” This alleged incident led to the usual sort of outrage. On the Friday following, several hundred homosexuals gathered in the street outside the pub to kiss each other. The pub closed early. Though its landlord has not so far made any…
Last night’s episode of the CBS mystery The Mentalist, “Red Alert,” included some of the most explicitly pro-liberty, anti-government scenes you could ever hope to see. Rushing to a murder scene to assist in an official investigation, California Bureau of Investigation criminal consultant (and genius detective) Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) is stopped by a local deputy police officer in a speed trap. Jane identifies himself as a CBI investigator, but the deputy ignores that and treats him in the arrogant, highhanded manner most drivers have…
A recent New York magazine article has raised a bit of a ruckus on the right. In his long article on libertarianism, Christopher Beam appears both fascinated and puzzled by the odd phenomenon under his microscope. Anyone at all familiar with libertarianism will recognize that his characterization of the movement and the philosophy behind it is something of a caricature, but there is a serious critique to be found in his article. That critique is seriously wrong, as it happens, and understanding just where Beam…
There are some false dichotomies in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column denigrating what he calls the Tea Kettle movement (such as that diagnosing symptoms somehow makes it impossible to offer policies, that popularity makes a movement automatically suspect, etc.), but he does get a couple of things very right: the description of what kind of presidential and congressional leadership is needed today, the point that real decisions about spending cuts have to be made if the current public dissatisfaction with government is to have…
There is a culture war, and we need it, argues Carol Iannone on NRO’s The Corner. I don’t like martial metaphors, but I strongly agree with Carol Iannone that there are basically two worldviews competing irreconcilably in the United States today. One, called progressivism, derives from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and tends to blame all human problems on imperfect social institutions. Individuals devoted to this worldview concentrate great effort on the perfecting of institutions according to their idea of social justice, which evolves as…
President Obama will be delivering his first State of the Union address on Wednesday night — and it should be an interesting address in the wake of the Massachusetts Miracle and the collapse of ObamaCare in Congress. Certainly, the speech-writers have been working overtime this week to make the proper (and, hopefully, humblng) adjustments. The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank peopled by scholars of a libertarian bent, is going to be live-blogging Obama’s speech. It will be using the “Cover it Live” program, which means…
Exemplifying the great cultural gulf between those who build the country and those who rule it, U.S. troops in Afghanistan are rapidly losing morale as President Obama dithers over what to do. The central question: what is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan? Unlike the situation in Iraq, U.S. military personnel on the ground are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the United States cannot realistically hope to achieve any positive result by continued occupation of Afghanistan. Thus their morale sags as their comrades die or…
The animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was unexpectedly successful last weekend as U.S. movie audiences continued to seek out more positive stories, S. T. Karnick writes.
A former associate editor of National Review magazine says Christopher Buckley’s departure from his back-page column was not a firing, and the magazine embraces diverse viewpoints within conservatism. But that’s the real problem with the contemporary right: it lacks a set of coherent principles.
Robert Downey Jr., star of the megahit movie Iron Man, has signed on for a new film that crosses genres and may have some interesting and salutary ideas.
A California court’s ruling that the state of California must approve of same-sex marriages is being hailed as a blow for freedom. In fact it is exactly the opposite.
In an article ostensibly considering the literary legacy of science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, John Derbyshire veers off into an interesting discussion of the current American culture. Derbyshire’s conclusion is that a great separation of American society has taken place since the 1950s: America has always had elites, of course, and we have always had an underclass of some kind. Both seem to be much bigger now than they were then, though. Furthermore, if you subtracted off the elites and the underclass in Heinlein’s time, what…
"We don’t owe the president our unquestioning agreement," U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar said yesterday in a stunning, lengthy, unnanounced speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Reflecting to a significant extent the ideas outlined in my articles on A Classical Liberal View of the Iraq War, originally presented in detail here on The American Culture, Sen. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bluntly said that the Bush administration’s plan for Iraq is simply not working.
Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn’s work. Shlaes’s new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it. It’s a…
A commenter suggests that classical liberal principles are an impractical guide to international issues. Susan Behrend writes, You are forgetting one thing – leaving a chaotic Afghanistan to the Taliban led directly to the 9/11 attacks. When the Soviets left, the world community just left the Afghans to sort it all out. They didn’t do a very good job of it. . . . We can’t leave Iraq to descend into becoming a failed state, unable to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing training camps. It is…
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