We in the United States should take good note of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's accomplishments. Thatcher's life's work is of immense relevance because today's United States has more in common with the Great Britain that Thatcher took over in 1979 than with the United States of 1981 when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency after the inept Jimmy Carter administration. . . .
A truly liberal person will steadfastly oppose actions of government that force people to act against their conscience or allow individuals to do harm to other human beings. I believe that those are the principles we should consider when looking at facts about government-financed public education and a government-enforced policy of unlimited elective abortions. I welcome those who disagree, to state the principles by which they do so, with equal directness and brevity. Nothing else can justify any sort of collective action against individuals. .…
My overall take-away is that the term “conservative” doesn't seem to have much positive meaning anymore. The only thing these writers have in common as a group is their rejection of big government. Our country could change into something almost unrecognizable, and it would still be considered a conservative victory by the standards of many of these writers.
“Despite the Left’s best efforts, conservative and American values are actually coming back into the culture,” Andrew Klavan writes.
It’s almost getting tiresome to me, this picking on Peggy Noonan for her naivete concerning Barack Obama. Almost. She’s coming around to the truth of Obama’s hard leftism and the phoniness of his HopeyChange campaign rhetoric slower than my quest to lose that extra 20 pounds I’ve been carrying around for five years. At some point, I expect Noonan’s BS meter to finally redline, and read a column in the vital Wall Street Journal in which her great talents are righteously unleashed on Obama. But…
Steven Weber, who starred in “Wings,” is a contributor to that font of mainstream Hollywood liberal thought, The Huffington Post. Can’t quite place Steven Weber? C’mon. Don’t you remember that NBC sitcom? It’s the one where the guys who played supporting characters — like the imbecile mechanic (Thomas Hayden Church) and the immigrant taxi driver (Tony Shalhoub) — went on to be big stars. Apparently, Weber — always billed as a “star” of that show (Weber was the cute, younger of the two protagonist brothers) — still…
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…
Hollywood conservatives are increasingly coming out of the closet and defying the McCarthyite bullying by the industry’s overwhelmingly leftist power brokers.
William F. Buckley, author, columnist, TV talk show host, and founding editor of National Review magazine, died today at age 82. Buckley was one of the people most responsible for making the conservative movement a powerful force in the United States during the past six decades. Especially through his influential magazine, Buckley set the agenda for the American right and made it appealing to a mass audience. His editorial approach and political philosophy combined to create an ecumenism on the right that allowed the various…
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…
Our friend Hunter Baker has written a very insightful piece on current politics for the excellent newspaper Human Events. Baker considers the recent groundswell of support for Rudy Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination, and remains skeptical. Baker sees what makes Guiuliani so appealing: Republicans hungry for revenge after getting blown out in the 2006 elections are thinking hard about letting the mayor carry the party’s banner in 2008. As Michael Barone has demonstrated, Giuliani has the potential to turn the electoral map substantially in…
The attention to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s stances on social issues has been intense in the past several weeks. This makes sense because Giuliani is an obviously perfect candidate for the Republicans—except for his often rocky personal life and his past support for legal abortion and for changing laws to have the government enforce homosexual marriages. I have argued that Giuliani is indeed not a conservative, but that he is a liberal of the right, what we call a classical liberal, and that…
Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War: There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists. Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the…
In my article yesterday in National Review Online, and in subsequent discussions here, I have suggested a return to the philosophy of classical liberalism as an antidote to both big-government conservatism (the current-day Republicans) and what I call New Age conservatism (the current-day Democrats). As I pointed out six months ago on Tech Central Station, big-government conservatism is a mess both politically and as policy . And the Democrats’ success in the recent elections suggests that they will stick with their New Age conservatism for…
Tuesday’s elections were, as widely expected, a solid thrashing for the Republican Party. But the real loser was classical liberalism. And the winner was conservatism. Republicans lost fewer House and Senate seats than was expected earlier in the year, dropping about the average amount lost in a President’s sixth year. They have lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives and very possibly the Senate, as we await likely recounts in races in Virginia and Montana—states that had trended Republican in recent years. Very tellingly,…
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