Principles Of Government

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This site is designed to generate ideas for a supplementary section on think tank websites.
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Foundational articles (AA) are repeated in Section (A). Both (AA) and (A) articles provide key insights on major policy and cultural issues, while (B) articles address currently urgent or more technical topics that may be replaced more frequently as they become dated.

(Foundational) Culture, Character and Ideology

100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead AA

By David Satter - Nov. 6, 2017

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By David Satter – The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors….The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day… Read More

A Homeric Age of Statesmanship AA

By Robert D. Kaplan - Aug. 26, 2022

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By Robert D. Kaplan – Standing in contrast to these misdeeds are the records of three great Republican secretaries of state who shepherded American diplomacy during the middle and late phases of the Cold War: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker III. Their successes were inextricable from their understanding of America as a nation-state, a worldview that put the needs of the U.S. above all else. Read More

Is Lincoln Speaking to us? AA

By John Walters – August 19, 2022

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By John Walters – By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others … a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. …Is Lincoln’s warning grounded in a timeless truth?… We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?…Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals?….they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal and unified manner. …they seek to shatter the existing order and bring the world around them under their domination. Read More

Western Culture Elites Are Giving Away Lenin’s Rope A

By Gerard Baker - March 23, 2021

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By Gerard Baker – The larger truth is that the people who control America’s leading cultural institutions and now its government have been eagerly manufacturing ideological rope for the Chinese hangman….The intellectual movement to which they subscribe has been the force behind the planned destruction—of the principal pillars of America’s authority in the world: the idea that the greatest nation on the planet was founded on universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. …How can a nation prevail in a global ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are intrinsically evil? … Read More