The last several days have been a sandstorm of activity for me, which is why, paradoxically, the blog has been so quiet. I’ve got several book reviews pending — one finished over the weekend, another undergoing a bit of polish, and the third under construction. On Monday morning, I gave a talk at [...]
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 [...]
Cory Robin has some curious ideas about conservatism — apparently it’s a straight line of exploiters and insiders with persecution complexes from Burke and Maistre to Barry Goldwater — but his Nation review of several recent books about conservatism is worth reading for his exposure of Jacob Heilbrunn’s quote borrowing (some might say “plagiarism”), if [...]
The lefty magazine continues to give the Ron Paul movement better coverage than the neocon press, which can only splutter in outrage at the thought of an antiwar, pro-market Republican. The Nation is none too good on market economics itself, and puts in a few nasty digs in its coverage of the rising class of [...]
I’m leaning towards voting for Barr come November. But if Obama picks Virginia Sen. Jim Webb as his running mate, I might have to vote Democratic. Browsing through Webb’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, I see that Webb has a reasonably sound view on the drug war. After [...]
My review of Pure Goldwater, a volume of Barry Goldwater’s journals (and some other odds and ends), is now up on Reason’s website.
I’m reading Bill Buckley’s posthumous Goldwater memoir, Flying High, right now. Here’s one striking anecdote I hadn’t heard before:
… at this dinner [for the 1950s Freeman], Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, [...]
One of the things I found dissatisfying about George Packer’s recent “fall of conservatism” piece was its establishment bias. He can’t be accused of talking only to neocons and movement thralls — Pat Buchanan was in the mix alongside Rich Lowry and David Brooks — but Packer only spoke to established names, when the most [...]
My review of Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism is now on-line. And here’s author Bill Kauffman’s review of Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara, from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.
Light updating this week as the forthcoming issue of The American Conservative has been in the works (with articles by Peter Hitchens, Bill Kauffman, and other worthies) and I have three articles to write for various outlets over the next ten days or so. Blogging tends to get neglected in such circumstances.
While I’m at [...]
The 4/21 issue of The American Conservative, which should be showing up in bookstores and subscribers’ mailboxes right about now, contains my article “The Ron Paul Evolution,” on the future of the Ron Paul movement — already there are candidates, a youth organization, and nonprofit ventures rising out of the Paul phenomenon, and there’s much [...]