Ross Douthat

Speaking of future foreign policy debates, Ambinder raises a good question:... Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public, (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like… More »

Of my various remarks about foreign-policy schools, a reader writes:I think you're creating all sorts of divisions where none really exist. There is NO substantive division between Democratic realists and Democratic internationalists and not much between them and their likeminded Republican brethren. The predominant strain of thought in American foreign policy since WW 2 has been liberal/internationalist/realist. It was conceived by… More »

There's some interesting discussion around David Leonhardt's review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers - and particularly around this passage:These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics -- talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck -- the starring role. The second version doesn't necessarily… More »

That's the lesson of the Blagejovich affair, right? (And the Rangel case, the William Jefferson scandal, and many more to come, no doubt ...) I mean, it seems like a pretty airtight generalization to me: Liberalism's ideological predisposition to expanding government power inevitably leads to gross corruption, which is why we should only trust conservatives, those flinty stewards of the common weal, to run our public institutions.Right, Alan Wolfe? Right? More »

After allowing that her head tells her to "recoil from political dynasties," Ruth Marcus lets her heart make the case for Senator Kennedy of New York:At the same time ... it would be silly to imagine that every senator or other person in high office has paid his -- or her -- political dues. A big bundle of cash -- see, for example, Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs chairman, former senator from New Jersey, now New Jersey governor -- is helpful for vaulting your way… More »

Whether or not the "Future is Cao" (oh, John Boehner ...) - and indeed, whether or not the newest Louisiana Congressman has any chance of winning re-election once the Democrats get their act together and put up someone who didn't get caught with an illicit $90,000 in his freezer - I hope that we can all agree with an over-the-moon Reihan that the world would be a better place if the Republican minority included many more politicians like Joseph Cao. Indeed, I think… More »

Incidentally, just because conservatives need to think hard about infrastructure doesn't mean that they necessarily need to embrace infrastructure spending as stimulus. (See Brooks today, for instance.) On the that front, the case for pushing a payroll-tax holiday seems pretty strong to me - but then again, I'm always up for weakening the payroll tax. More »

I've gone all squishy about my youthful monarchism since I left Harvard, but I'm gratified that a new generation of campus conservatives has picked up the baton (or the sceptre?):Asked to describe himself in three words, the classics concentrator-cum-Undergraduate Council presidential candidate takes a few moments of reflection and replies, "A human being." Roger G. Waite '10-'11 offered only a few words more, "To the best of my knowledge, I am a human being." Then… More »

Obviously I sympathize with many of the notes Bill Kristol strikes in his column today. But I think he's ultimately taking the argument too far, to the point where he seems to be suggesting that the modern Right can succeed by disentangling itself from "small government conservatism" entirely - which is as implausible as the notion that the GOP can succeed by ceasing to be the party of social conservatism. (In both cases, you need a baseline of idealism - about the… More »

This Telegraph story is headlined "words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary," but the purge of animal names from the (admittedly only 10,000-word) Oxford Junior Dictionary seems just as disquieting as the disappearance of words like minister, monastery, monk, and nun. Here's some of what's out:adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish,… More »

To my comment that pro-lifers have spent most of their political capital over the last decade working within the Roe/Casey framework to push very modest restrictions on abortion, Conor Friedersdorf writes:... pro-lifers have often made the compromises that Ross articulates insofar as they have focused on those issues. But are pro-life voters willing to elect politicians who favor legal abortion, but also support "modest state-level restrictions, from parental… More »

I have an op-ed in today's Times on what will be a familiar theme to most of my readers: The pro-life movement and the possibility of an abortion compromise. More »

Andy Ferguson on the attempt to reboot the National Museum of American History.The University Bookman's "regionalism" issue.Frum on George Packer.Brooks and TNR on Obama's education choices.Cato Unbound debates the roots of the economic crisis; Tyler Cowen chimes in.And of course, the entire December issue of the Atlantic. More »

Oh, and speaking of those old aristocrats ... sometimes they can still get things right. (h/t: Rod Dreher) More »

A first-person account, with Ta-Nehisi as his interlocutor: More »

Last week, both Ta-Nehisi and Megan had posts on the dubiousness of the search for villains in our current economic mess, when the fault may lie less with specific nefarious actors - whether on Wall Street or in Washington - than with ourselves as a people, and with the desires and impulses and stupidities of a mass capitalist society. Henry Blodget makes a related argument in the just-out December issue of our magazine, arguing that "the interaction of human… More »

Over at Secular Right - which I intend to read, er, religiously, though I'd rather its creators were expending their energy on a less self-segregated platform - Razib/David Hume wonders if there's any empirical evidence for the contention that the younger generation is more pro-gay but also more pro-life than their elders, and then conjures up with some data from the General Social Survey that supports the proposition: Making the question about "abortion on… More »

Earlier this week, Jonah Goldberg brought up a perennial favorite topic around these parts, arguing that as much as David Simon's show was beloved by liberals, it was actually a powerful indictment of a liberal-run urban bureaucracy, and a corrective to various self-serving liberal myths about race, poverty, and crime. In a sense, that's all true! But as we ponder The Wire's crypto-conservatism, or lack thereof, it's worth quoting Simon himself (from an Atlantic… More »

James Poulos, on the lessons of Iraq:Of course, people get antsy when you won't cough up a grand ideology to match your grand strategy, but that's sort of the point; and now I'll make what looks like an about-face and suggest that, for someone not tethered to realism or neoconservatism as a matter of ideological principle, the Iraq war was not terribly chastening, even if it was formative, because some of us suspected from the beginning that there was really only… More »

Per the criticisms from Poulos and Larison, I should say that I was playing along with Walter Russell Mead's division of the American foreign policy tradition into Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Jacksonian strains, rather than endorsing it, and I agree that it runs into all sorts of difficulties very quickly - not least of which is the question of whether any of the three worthies not named Wilson are really the best figureheads for the viewpoints their… More »