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By Gerard Baker - But the power of our example would never have been enough without the example of our power. In the absence of sustained military commitments, strategic engagement and repeated sacrifice, there was nothing guaranteed about the victory of our ideas. We need to remember that truth as we survey the world today. Not since the worst days of the Cold War, perhaps not since the 1930s, have we faced such a combination of threats to our freedom and prosperity, to our very existence. A touching faith in the supposed universality of our ideals and the inevitable rightness…
By Walter Russell Meade - Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow…
By John Ellis - Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education…
By Gary Saul Morson - Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle.... during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured ... and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine.... In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism ...Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any…
By Christopher Caldwell - ...In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding....The real political legacy of the 1960s comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964....…The new law cut constitutional corners, constraining freedom of association, ... drawing the federal government into the running of local elections. It opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits: The U.S. attorney general, for instance, could now file discrimination suits against local school districts. It imposed a degree of federal management on all institutions that received federal money. And it created a vast investigative infrastructure through the Equal…
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…
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.… it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him…
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
By Orrin Hatch - …Somewhere between the rise of cable news and social media, our shared sense of reality splintered. We live in an era of endless political narratives, in which the phrase “my truth” is supposed to be taken seriously. .. Americans today cannot agree on the existence of facts, let alone what the facts are…. This article is included to draw attention to the grave problem of the left’s domination of higher education and its profound influence on our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future… Read More