Free Republic

Among the many dark tidings for American conservatism, there is one genuine bright spot. Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene. These writers came of age as official conservatism slipped into decrepitude. Most of them were dismayed by what the Republican Party had become under Tom DeLay and seemed put off by the shock-jock rhetorical style of Ann Coulter. As a result, most have the conviction — which was rare in earlier generations — that something is fundamentally wrong with the right, and it needs to be fixed. Moreover,...

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.rsations But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today...

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson. But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce...

The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality. Millions of parents, preachers, newspaper editors and teachers expounded the message. The result was quite remarkable. The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal. Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what...

In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln seems to have at least vaguely thought of suicide. His friend Joshua Speed found him one day thrashing about in his room. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed wrote. “I had to remove razors from his room — take away all Knives and other such dangerous things — it was terrible.” Lincoln was taking three mercury pills a day, the remedy in those days for people who either suffered from syphilis or feared contracting it. “Lincoln could not eat or sleep,” Daniel Mark Epstein writes in his new book, “The Lincolns.” “He appeared at the statehouse irregularly,...

...More fundamentally, McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the G.O.P. sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom. Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind. I’ve spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the...

Right off the bat he reaffirmed that Hezbollah is “not a legitimate political party.” Instead, “It’s a destabilizing organization by any common-sense standard. This wouldn’t happen without the support of Iran and Syria.” I asked him what he meant with all this emphasis on electoral and patronage reform. He said the U.S. should help the Lebanese government deliver better services to the Shiites “to peel support away from Hezbollah” and encourage the local populace to “view them as an oppressive force.” The U.S. should “find a mechanism whereby the disaffected have an effective outlet for their grievances, which assures them...

For years, American and British politics were in sync. Reagan came in roughly the same time as Thatcher, and Clinton’s Third Way approach mirrored Blair’s. But the British conservatives never had a Gingrich revolution in the 1990s or the Bush victories thereafter. They got their losing in early, and, in the wilderness, they rethought modern conservatism while their American counterparts were clinging to power. Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American conservatives are on the way down. British conservatives have moved beyond Thatcherism, while American conservatives pine for another Reagan. The British Conservative Party enjoyed a series...

...The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage economic anxiety... But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world. Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change. Some Americans have seen their jobs shipped overseas, but global competition has accounted for a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few...

How Obama Fell to Earth By DAVID BROOKS Published: April 18, 2008 Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new - an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that. But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal. He sprinkled his debate...

The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault. We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. Second, Obama and Clinton were completely irresponsible. As the first President Bush discovered, it is simply irresponsible statesmanship (and stupid politics) to make blanket pledges to win votes. Both candidates did that on vital...

We’re in the middle of a series of historic economic transformations. A string of technological revolutions have made American workers much more productive. Over the past 30 years, steel producers have reduced the number of hours it takes to produce a ton of steel by up to 90 percent. A social revolution has radically increased the number of women in the work force and pushed down the wages of men. A medical revolution has led to enhanced diagnosis and treatment but also rapid health care inflation that burdens American employers and eats into workers’ weekly paychecks. An information revolution has...

Barack Obama says: “John McCain is determined to carry out four more years of George Bush’s failed policies.” Obama is a politician, so it’s normal that he’d choose to repeat the lines that some of his followers want to hear. But before people buy that argument, I’d ask them to read three speeches.--snip--...he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.

Sometimes you read something so simultanteously insightful and eloquent that you just have to share it with others. That's how I feel about David Brooks' column in today's New York Times, The Long Defeat. Brooks begins by convincingly making the case that Hillary's chances of winning the Dem nomination have decreased to a paltry 5%. As Brooks puts it: "Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near." Yet all signs point to her soldiering on to the bitter end, seriously harming Barack Obama's general election prospects along the...

Barack Obama had a theory. It was that the voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years. The theory was that if Obama could inspire a grass-roots movement with a new kind of leadership, he could ride it to the White House and end gridlock in Washington. Obama has built his entire campaign on this theory. He’s run against negativity and cheap-shot campaigning. He’s claimed that there’s an “awakening” in this country — people “hungry for a different kind of politics.” This message has made him the front-runner. It has brought millions of new voters into...

The staff of the McCain campaign had a rude awakening last Jan. 25th. They opened The Washington Post and found a front-page story linking McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, to the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Who, some wondered, was feeding damaging information about Davis to the press? Skip to next paragraph Speculation inevitably settled, as it must in McCain World, upon John Weaver. For nearly a decade, stories about the inner workings of the McCain apparatus inevitably involved the Weaver-Davis rivalry. These two McCain advisers share a mutual hatred, one McCainiac told me Thursday, that is total, absolute and...

There’s a big difference between the Republican and Democratic campaigns: The Republicans have split on policy grounds; the Democrats haven’t. There’s been a Republican divide between center and right, yet no Democratic divide between center and left. But when you think about it, the Democratic policy unity is a mirage. If the Democrats actually win the White House, the tensions would resurface with a vengeance. The first big rift would involve Iraq. Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have seductively hinted that they would withdraw almost all U.S. troops within 12 to 16 months. But if either of them...

I’m not a Hillary-hater. She’s been an outstanding senator. She hung tough on Iraq through the dark days of 2005. In this campaign, she has soldiered on bravely even though she has most of the elected Democrats, news media and the educated class rooting against her. But there are certain moments when her dark side emerges and threatens to undo the good she is trying to achieve. Her campaign tactics before the South Carolina primary were one such moment. Another, deeper in her past, involved Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. Cooper is one of the most thoughtful, cordial...

“To make a sentimental or untimely exhibition of affection; to display enthusiasm in a silly, demonstrative manner.” — Webster, 1913. For example, this snippet from today’s New York Times editorial. Americans are going to feel good about [his] victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience….[He] has achieved something remarkable. At first blush, his speeches are abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift — filled with disquisitions on the nature of hope and the contours of change. Can you guess of whom the writer wrote?

Road to Nowhere Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Share Del.icio.us Digg Facebook Newsvine Permalink By DAVID BROOKS Published: January 1, 2008 The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party’s nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms. Skip to next paragraph David Brooks Go to Columnist Page » Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For...

The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party’s nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms. Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo. He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17...

Once there was a majority in favor of liberal immigration policies, but apparently that’s not true anymore, at least if you judge by campaign rhetoric. Once there was a bipartisan consensus behind free trade, but that’s not true anymore, either. Even Republicans, by a two-to-one majority, believe free trade is bad for America, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. Once upon a time, the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are rising out of poverty would have been a source of pride and optimism. But if you listen to the presidential candidates, improvements in the...

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Welcome to Drexel University, the site of tonight’s Democratic presidential debate. Let’s get started with Senator Barack Obama. Senator, you’ve vowed to spend this entire debate standing on Senator Clinton’s windpipe while reducing her to a quivering mass of jelly. How do you plan on doing that? SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Well, Brian, as you know the goal of my campaign is to make this country as noble as I am. But without casting aspersion or criticism in any direction, I have noticed that Senator Clinton, probably without meaning to, has not fully contextualized her discourse, which has had...

Some elections are defined by the gap between the rich and the poor. Others are defined by the gap between the left and the right. But this election will be shaped by the gap within individual voters themselves — the gap between their private optimism and their public gloom. American voters are generally happy with their own lives. Eighty-six percent of Americans say they are content with their jobs, according to the General Social Survey. Seventy-six percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their family income, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Sixty-two percent of Americans expect their...

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood. During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another. Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition...

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change. When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders. Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while...

A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence of I.Q. For a time, I.Q. was the most reliable method we had to capture mental aptitude. People had the impression that we are born with these information-processing engines in our heads and that smart people have more horsepower than dumb people. And in fact, there’s something to that. There is such a thing as general intelligence; people who are good at one mental skill tend to be good at others. This intelligence is partly hereditary. A meta-analysis by Bernie Devlin of the University of Pittsburgh found that...

You better put down your drinks, and make sure there's nothing in your mouths, for the New York Times's David Brooks made a comment on Friday's News Hour that is guaranteed to evoke uncontrollable fits of laughter from those on the right side of the aisle. After introducing regular guests Brooks and Mark Shields, host Jim Lehrer asked their opinions concerning the just-released Osama bin Laden video.

The biggest story of this presidential campaign is the success of Hillary Clinton. Six months ago, many people thought she was too brittle and calculating and that voters would never really bond with her. But now she seems to offer the perfect combination of experience and change. She's demonstrating that it really helps to have lived in the White House. She can draw on a range of experiences unmatched by her rivals. She's dominated most of the debates. She's transformed her position on Iraq without a ripple. Her measured, statistic-filled speeches rarely inspire passion, but always confidence. Her success has...

If you've been driving around listening to pop radio stations this spring and summer, you'll have noticed three songs that are pretty much unavoidable, and each of them is a long way from puppy love. First, there's "Before He Cheats," by Carrie Underwood. This is a song about a woman who catches her boyfriend in a bar fooling around with someone else. But she's not wounded or insecure. She's got nothing but contempt for the slobbering, cologne-wearing jerk. She's disgusted by the bleached blond girly-girl who's leading him on and who doesn't even know how to drink whiskey.

A cast of thousands crowded the stage, filling the the air with fevered vapors and gleeful rage. The media stakeouts of Karl Rove's driveway, the delirious calls from producers (The indictment is coming today!)The media types so eager to get Rove, back when everyone thought he was the key leaker. Richard Armitage was as Fitzgerald knew from the start. It was like a city of Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale. The trial to be honest, was somehwat aniclimatic. Fitzgerald, casting himself as Javert, demanded Libby get a harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not...

Terrorism's Newfangled Insurgent Advantage Terrorism's Newfangled Insurgent Advantage By David Brooks Published on 5/19/2007 in Home »Editorial »Perspective The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It has destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair's government in Britain, Ehud Olmert's government in Israel and Nouri al-Maliki's government in Iraq. And here's a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well. That's because setbacks in the war on terror don't only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They're structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological...

There is an argument floating around Republican circles that to win again, the GOP has to reconnect with the truths of its Goldwater-Reagan glory days. It has to once again be the minimal-government party, the maximal-freedom party, the party of rugged individualism and states’ rights. This is folly. It’s the wrong diagnosis of current realities and, so, the wrong prescription for the future. Back in the 1970s, when Reaganism became popular, top tax rates were in the 70s, growth was stagnant and inflation was high. Federal regulation stifled competition. Government welfare policies enabled a culture of dependency. In short, in...

A Fuzzy StrategeryAgree to DisagreeBy Rob FishmanNov 15 2006Yesterday, Sun Columnist Billy McMorris argued that, as students, we should take time away from partying and sleeping, and express our gratitude to the nearly 3,000 soldiers who have died so far in Iraq. Billy does what George Bush does: instead of defending the Iraq War, he points to the sacrifices of our soldiers. It’s a crafty strategy of misdirection, to channel our grief for dead soldiers into support for the ongoing war in Iraq.There was a time when such sacrifices might have been sensible. Maybe at first, we could justify soldiers’...

by Mark Finkelstein October 5, 2006 - 13:30 David Brooks' New York Times column of this morning on the Foley matter, "A Tear in Our Fabric," is so important that I'd normally be inclined to simply reproduce it in its entirety and let it speak for itself. But as a subscription-required item, I hesitate to do that. I do offer an extended-but-edited excerpt for our readers' consideration: "This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get...

There are victory markers strewn across southern Lebanon commemorating the last time Israel withdrew from that land. While reporting a piece for The New Yorker a few years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg would come upon them by the roads. One brightly colored sign, written in both Arabic and (rough) English, marked the spot where “On Oct. 19, 1988 at 1:25 p.m. a martyr car that was booby-trapped with 500 kilograms of highly exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of fire and limbs.” Busloads of tourists would take victory tours and stop at the prominent sights. Before the current war,...

David Brooks of the New York Times has been on a quite an anti-liberal blogosphere roll of late. After eviscerating Markos Moulitsas Zuniga – the proprietor of the Daily Kos – in a June 25 op-ed entitled “Respect Must be Paid For,” Brooks again ripped into Kos on Friday night’s “The News Hour” on PBS (video link courtesy of Crooks and Liars). Brooks followed this up with another op-ed tangentially on this subject Sunday. On Friday evening, the discussion between host Jim Lehrer, Mark Shields, and Brooks centered around Joe Lieberman’s problems in Connecticut. Lehrer asked Brooks how Lieberman is...

Enron and the Clintonites The Clintonites may have been more accommodating than the Bushies. by David Brooks 01/21/2002, Volume 007, Issue 18 ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a trade mission with Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power plant. Enron, then a growing giant in energy trading, practically had a reserved seat on Clinton administration trade junkets. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who egregiously linked political donations to government assistance, accompanied ...

Partisanship has a funny way of making small differences seem huge. Listen to Howard Dean and you’d think that Republicans are orcs while Democrats are the saviors of Middle-earth. Similarly, in the 1990s, Republicans — including, at times, yours truly — talked about Bill Clinton as if he were the worst thing ever spewed from the bowels of Mordor. Many have noted that this partisan rage is a result of the tyranny of small differences. Clinton’s New Democrat rhetoric made him sound like an old Republican. And George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” boilerplate made him sound like, well, a New...

We spent Saturday at the Ice Grottos. After a week in Aspen, we're finally acclimated to breathing at 8,000+ feet, so this was a glorious day, the best so far --- we read for hours on the shore of a mountain stream as our daughter played with dolls in the sand. So it wasn't until after dinner that I logged on and saw the David Brooks column that makes Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of DailyKos.com, look as smarmy as Karl Rove. My wife, Karen Collins, is a devoted Kossack and a frequent poster on the site's message boards, so I...

The elevator guy is cheerful and the subway operators are polite, but there is something about the subterranean trip from the Capitol back to your Senate office building that gets you down. The dinginess. The barren walls. And you don't need that right now. You're a Republican senator supporting the immigration compromise. For weeks now -- months, actually! -- you've been besieged by the close-the-border restrictionists, who shut down your phone lines and scream at you in town meetings. You've been hit with slopping barrages of manure by Limbaugh, Savage, Levin and every other talk-radio jock in the Northern Hemisphere....

The smartest people in both parties have shifted attention from the past to the future. Can you spare a moment for the nation's sole remaining optimist? The Times/CBS News Poll that was reported Wednesday revealed that Americans are more pessimistic about the country's direction than at almost any time in the past 23 years. George W. Bush's approval numbers are so low that he's now only five points more popular than John Kerry and three points more popular than Al Gore. But from where I sit as president of the Prozac Would Be Redundant Society, all the negativity is a...

Weekend Talk Show *Preview* for 5/13 - 5/14 (not the live thread)The main message is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.ABC This Week (George Stephanopoulos) Meme: It's Mother's Day - they want the day off to be with Mom.Put Biden and Hagel on... it's autopilot time... we can phone this one in!We say that the NSA programs are all bad, therefore they're bad.  Don't listen to anyone else.See?  We're not being mean to (Laura) Bush, which means we're fair and...

From oil to AIDS to Armageddon, liberals are buying the bizarre claims set forth in "American Theocracy." There's always been a strain of paranoia running through American politics. Back in the mid-1960s, when the right felt powerless, the John Birch Society thrived. Today, when the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips, whose book "American Theocracy" is in its fifth week on the New York Times' best-seller list. Phillips' method is pretty conventional for conspiracists -- he takes a single issue or set of data points and constructs an all-explaining story line to show how...

Journal Editorial Report (Paul Gigot) - FNC show page Meme: The Republicans are doomed if they do and doomed if they don't on immigration Topics: The Republican brawl over immigration: An interview with pollster Matthew Dowd on the politics of reform (Opinion Journal web site)Journal editors handicap the showdown between President Bush and GOP restrictionists. (Opinion Journal web site)Immigration reform and the Hispanic vote: Are hard-line Republicans jeopardizing the GOP's future as a majority party for short-term gains this November? (FNC web site) Guests Matthew Dowd I used to work for George Bush, now I work the Ahnuld on his...

To the Editor: Re "Places, Everyone. Action!" (column, Feb. 16): David Brooks laments the lack of a "normal human response" (sympathy) to Dick Cheney's hunting accident. ........

Even if one suspected that the feminists were not being entirely candid in this obeisance to traditional moms, it was hard to come up with the proof, specific statements of disdain from them for women’s traditional roles in the family. Not anymore. In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks reported on Linda Hirshman, a retired Brandeis professor who has decided the time is right to push the feminist case to the next plateau, to, as she says, “radicalize feminism.”

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. What’s the most important thing most of us will do? The answer is, obviously, raise our kids. And that’s what New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in his New Year’s Day column, but believe it or not, he caught all sorts of grief. Brooks was responding to a recent piece in the American Prospect by Linda Hirshman of Brandeis. She criticized the idea that “staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option.” For Hirshman, “the family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks— . . ....

If he'd been born a little earlier, Sam Alito would probably have been a Democrat. In the 1950's, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places like Trenton, where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. But by the late 1960's, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers. The liberals were doves; the ethnics were...

Every generation of Americans casts Israel in its own morality tale. For a time, Israel was the plucky underdog fighting for survival against larger foes. Now, as Steven Spielberg rolls out the publicity campaign for his new movie, "Munich," we see the crystallization of a different fable. In this story, the Israelis and the Palestinians are parallel peoples victimized by history and trapped in a cycle of violence.... This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent. But when it is political, Spielberg has...