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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
My piece on the sordid career of David Frum — who has advanced himself at every stage by tearing down anyone to his right — is now on-line at The American Conservative. Frum has been taking shots at Ron Paul lately, so I’ve returned fire on the official Ron Paul blog, the Daily Dose.
Gee, guess who it is?
Then again, all of the top-tier Republicans are neocon favorites, as Bill Kristol says:
“I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy,” said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, “that I think Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice — and Romney.” Mr. Kristol said [...]
Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher comments on George W. Bush’s rather surprising invocation of Graham Greene in his speech earlier this month to the VFW in Kansas City:
Greene’s novel, in any case, pits the cynical, apolitical newspaperman (who has a Vietnamese girlfriend and an opium habit) against the Pyle character, who seems to be [...]
Brian Doherty argues that neoliberalism and (neo)conservatism aren’t nearly as dead as they ought to be.
Neoliberals by that name may be dead; neoliberalism reigns. Conservatism (especially minus libertarianism) may be out of ideas, but still commands enormous armies of dedicated voters—more than any other self-identified ideology.
To put it another way, the Soviet Union (to say [...]
From a year or so back, but I missed it the first time: the text, courtesy of the Guardian, of Peregrine Worsthorne’s talk on liberalism at the Athenaeum club. A snippet:
Today, however, liberalism is the only ism in a position not only to dream of world hegemony but to try to make that dream come [...]
Larry Arnhart’s blog is worth a link.
I’m probably not exactly a Darwinian conservative myself — my secret wish is to rehabilitate Lamarck — but plainly the assault on Darwin lately is ideological rather than scientific and must be resisted.
Addendum: Actually there’s quite a lot wrong with Arnhart’s specific ideas about Darwinian conservatism, including this, “Darwinian [...]
Neo Culpa, coming up next month in Vanity Fair. Here’s a bit of Richard Perle from the preview:
Richard Perle: “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after [...]