Free Republic

What Would Buckley Do? Malcolm A. Kline, June 9, 2010 Two years after his death, William F. Buckley, Jr., the ultimate conservative man of letters, still has a lot to teach the young and the rightward. In turn, there is no better person to pass on these lessons than the man who has become the preeminent historian of the conservative movement—Lee Edwards. Edwards, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, relays the insights that can be gleaned from the National Review founder’s life and work in his invaluable new book, William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker Of A Movement. For...

The Wrong Rights by: Mytheos Holt, August 18, 2009 This July, the Heritage Foundation hosted a talk by Abigail Thernstrom, the author of the newly released book Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, to discuss the findings of the book and explore its implications for current Constitutional/political discourse. Thernstrom began her talk with the warning that she “[had] not written a book that can be reduced to soundbytes.” Moreover, Thernstrom said, “I thought I’d focus on a few interconnected points that challenge conservative thinking in the hopes of getting a discussion going.” For many conservative...

The Unforgettable Great Communicator by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 12, 2009 The conservative pundits seeking to accumulate intellectual bona fides by aping the intelligentsia’s call to “forget Ronald Reagan” only succeed in proving themselves to be as vacuous as the allegedly educated elite. For example, one cultured pearl of current wisdom is that conservatives have to move beyond “variations of no.” Well, for openers, you have to move towards it before moving beyond it. A federal budget that rose by about $1 trillion when Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress does not indicate that the GOP...