Carl Oglesby Was Right

The tail end of last week was a busy time for TAC staff. Thursday, which was also the first day of CPAC, was our print date. I made it to the conclave just long enough to emcee Thomas DiLorenzo’s talk, “Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?”, before hotfooting it back to the office for a [...]

Politics and the NBA

There’s an irony worth pointing out in the story of the “Net Book Agreement,” which sounds like it ought to be something dealing with e-books but was actually a pact between British publishers and booksellers agreed to in 1899. The NBA specified that shops should sell books for prices set by the publishers; any discounting [...]

How David Frum Leads to Birther Madness

I’ve just posted this in the comments of the item below, but it’s worth repeating here:
If all a Tanenhaus wants is a Right that is a.) a little abashed about how Iraq turned out, but not really repentant, and b.) in favor of a “pro-family” welfare state, then he already has much of what he [...]

Believers in Anything

G.K. Chesterton never did say that the problem with atheism is not that it leads men to believe in nothing but that it leads them to believe in anything. That’s just as well, because the truth in that cliche is broader than the words themselves (in any permutation) denote. A more general statement might be: [...]

Why Obama Isn’t an American

St. Louis blogger Thomas Knapp has two questions for the “birthers” who believe that Barack Obama is not a “natural born citizen” of the United States. His second is especially pointed: does it really make sense to be exercised about this particular clause of the Constitution if you don’t care about the constitutionally dubious character [...]

The NRO Credo

Austin Bramwell thinks the writers of Takimag missed the mark in parodying NRO for April Fool’s Day. Rather than analyze his critique point by point, allow me to suggest, as straight-facedly as I can, what the actual NRO credo looks like. The ideology sketched below is not just good for Lowry, Ponnuru, and Goldberg, however [...]

The Illusionists

From a rather interesting 1977 essay by Jeane Kirkpatrick in Commentary:
Research has established that the party regular is attached to politics by social as well as ideological incentives (and sometimes also by material incentives) and that such attachment encourages the virtues of the good team member: cooperation, perseverence, loyalty, service, and the will to win. [...]

Save the eXile

The English-language Moscow alternative magazine that’s as much samizdat for the West as it is for Russians is under threat from the authorities. Mark Ames, editor and co-founder (with Matt Taibbi, lately of Rolling Stone) blogs about it here. (And here.)
There’s a campaign afoot to save the eXile, as an online zine if not a [...]

Notes on Nationalism

Here’s the link to my piece at Taki’s Magazine on nationalism and patriotism. There’s quite a bit of back-and-forth in the comments section.
In a nutshell, I say that patriotism has been taken to excess, particularly by conservatives, and nationalism (which is not simply excessive patriotism, but a distinct idea) is actually something that the United [...]

Was the Conservative Movement Made in the 1970s?

That’s what Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer argue, not entirely persuasively, in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This bit, though, gets it just about right:
A number of scholars emphasize the emergence in the 70s of a conservative “movement” that turned the nascent New Right from an extremist ideology and a fledgling faction [...]