Principles Of Government

All material on this site is for educational purposes only.
This site is designed to generate ideas for a supplementary section on think tank websites.
An online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is required get full use of this site.
(A) Articles are foundational content and (B) Articles are urgently important but may be replaced as they become dated

(A) Culture, Character and Ideology

The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit A

By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov - April 27, 2023

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By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov – The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job candidates may well be evaluated more by their record of supporting “social justice” than by their scientific achievements. Read More

‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil AA

By Gary Saul Morson - May 5, 2023

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By Gary Saul Morson – How was such evil possible? … but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains …had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More

Why Independence Day Matters A

By Michael B. Poliakoff - June 29, 2023

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By Michael B. Poliakoff – What these books have in common is an intense commitment to the liberal democracy that gives us the right to participate in it, indeed to criticize it. And, with that, the absolute obligation to instill the values and principles of our free society. Dr. Haass and President Daniels call not only for better K-12 civic education, but, like past president of Harvard University Derek Bok, for a required college course on American history and government….Those in our nation who do not understand the blessing of freedom and the price past generations paid for it are likely to scorn that heritage. Read More

Ex-Liberal Fred Siegel Saw New York Fall and Rise – Steven Malanga A

By Steven Malanga - May 9, 2023

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By Steven Malanga – As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.”…The “riot ideology” that Fred Siegel described in his 1997 book, “The Future Once Happened Here,” played a significant role in the decline of America’s cities in the 1970s and ’80s. Siegel, who died Sunday at 78, wrote that the riot ideology rested on the assumption that “the sins of racism” justified violence and criminality—and that only federal spending could solve those problems. Read More

DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America A

By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro - March 28, 2023

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By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro – … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”…. Read More