By Christopher Caldwell - But progressives have begun to describe the country that existed before the 1960s as not just flawed but outright illegitimate—and Democrats are following their lead. In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding. These excerpts are included to illustrate how the left is transforming our country by outflanking the democratic process through the courts... Read More
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 — individuals who have desires that make them 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…
By David Satter - 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.… 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.… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values,... Read More
By Philip Hamburger - The 1964 law targeted racial discrimination. Today’s problem is the suppression of dissent. It is time for a new civil-rights act that addresses the dangers of our time, not merely those of the 1960s. The threat again comes from discrimination, but now by the federal government as well as states and private organizations. Most worrisome is federal and state encouragement for private entities to discriminate against Americans with dissenting views. Also significant is discrimination that bars Americans from participating in services ordinarily open to the public. Read More
By John Ellis - Voters have the sense to resist notions like critical race theory. A generation from now, they may not. Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in. Read More
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
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…
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
Phil Gramm and Pat Toomey - His regulatory barrage and failed Progressive-era policies imperil …the American economy and our freedom. We face not an errant regulator or an officious bureaucrat, but a sea change in the economy’s regulatory ecosystem. The executive branch and its regulatory agencies are unbound by the laws they are supposed to uphold and hostile to the industries they regulate, undermining the political accountability at the heart of our republican government. Read More Read More