Ross Douthat

I missed Matt’s snarky comment about right-wing populism and ‘80s comedy: Mass market comedy, as seen in Hollywood films, strikes me as a pretty good partner for post-Goldwater conservatism. Comedy, to be funny, usually requires the skewering of the powerful in some sense. But the mass culture marketing demands that your product not actually do much to challenge prevailing ideas in the world. It's a bit of a paradoxical situation, but it nicely mirrors the… More »

What better day than Memorial Day to take some time and digest Jody Bottum's thought-provoking essay on "Death and Politics", in the latest First Things? (It's just the thing to kick back with after the barbecue ...) More »

Fletch as smug liberal crap, Ghostbusters as right-wing populist genius - Reihan explains it all. More »

Matt writes: To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party's leadership and political thinkers simply can't conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can't unilaterally end the war, then, there's no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside.… More »

We may not have Lost to kick around for the next nine months, but we do have the last Harry Potter novel coming up - and via the indispensible Jonathan Last comes the best Potter theory I've read in quite some time. It's so crazy, it might just turn out to be true. More »

It's interesting that the most compelling moment of the Presidential campaign so far involved a face-off between Rudy Giuliani and Ron Paul, because the two men demonstrate just how much two candidates can diverge on policy matters and still both be cast as the "libertarian" in the race. Paul is a libertarian of process and results, you might say: He wants a system of government designed to maximize individual freedom, which to his mind involves a return to lost… More »

Sure, Bob Shrum's book is doubtless tendentious and self-serving, but Michael Crowley's excerpts only confirm my abiding distaste for John Edwards, and my abiding mystification at his appeal. I understand that he's made himself over as the standard-bearer for smart lefty ideas of the sort that haven't had many standard-bearers of late, and I suppose that if a Republican candidate went around calling himself the Sam's Club candidate and talking up policies I favor… More »

Difficult as it may be to believe, I was less enthusiastic about last night's Lost finale than JPod. (Spoilers below the jump.) More »

Read Jonathan Last's account of how the Flight 93 Memorial is shaping up, and weep. The photo above, incidentally, is of D.C.'s World War I Memorial, which is simple, small, lovely and inspiring, even though it probably didn't cost $44.7 million dollars and definitely doesn't include any windchimes. Go figure. Photo by Flickr user JerseyHawaii used under a Creative Commons license. More »

Rod Dreher's friend the immigration lawyer writes: Real comprehensive immigration reform – seal the borders, amnesty those here – is never going to happen. The Democrats don't want to seal the borders, ever, because immigrants (eventually) vote Democrat (legally, if we're lucky). One third of the Republicans don't want to amnesty because they're immigrant (and Muslim!) hating know-nothings (I'm a conservative GOPer myself and I've learned this the hard way).… More »

I hope I am not being unkind to our sister publication when I say that I find National Journal's cover story on American decline almost entirely unpersuasive. Or rather, I find it persuasive that the Iraq War, the rise of China, and growing anti-Americanism from Moscow to Caracas are reducing American influence relative to where it stood in, say, the late 1990s or early 2003. But this is not at all the same thing as the beginning of the end of the American era. Yes… More »

I may be a prequel hater, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy a good Star Wars blogathon as much as the next dork. This entry, from one Ryland Walker Knight - with a name like that, he sounds like he should be carrying a machine gun through a post-apocalyptic landscape - mounts as convincing a defense as can be mounted of Revenge of the Sith, and though I'm not at all convinced, I'll concede his point that if Lucas had filmed the thing with subtitles, Mel… More »

Via a coworker, the case against copyright extension, in the form of a Spider Robinson short story. More »

Kathryn Jean Lopez writes: I just did a quick flip through a Simon & Schuster catalog for the fall. Mary Matalin’s Threshold imprint looks to be really taking off. How can you not be excited by the upcoming John Bolton Surrender Is Not an Option (Amen!)? She’s also got a Lynne Cheney autobiography (our next First Lady!), What’s the Matter with California?, and a book by the Duke lacrosse coach — subtitled: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case… More »

I would almost be sympathetic to Mark Helprin's argument that copyrights should last forever, and that his great-great grandchildren, rather than the publishers of Barnes & Noble Classics, should profit from Winter's Tale - almost but not quite, both for the reasons Matt proposes and for others - if he were simultaneously arguing for a far more lenient definition of "fair use." This, to my mind, is the real way that copyright and intellectual-property laws stifle… More »

Daniel Larison writes: Despite the best efforts of the Mehlmans and Martinezes to make the GOP ”relevant” to constituencies that don’t care much for Republican policies, the GOP’s core demographic remains and presumably will remain for the foreseeable future middle-class, married white voters with families. Yes, except that the core demographic isn't enough. The GOP can build a political majority around the married, Middle-American middle… More »

Speaking of military history, the latest Nation includes a review of what sounds like a fascinating Ian Kershaw book on ten "fateful choices," in 1940 and '41, that determined how the Second World War turned out. (I'm particularly interested in the argument that Hitler was right to declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor - or at least that he didn't have any better options.) More »

I agree with the general point of Fred Thompson's defense of teaching military history, and the old Victor Davis Hanson column that he draws on, though I share some of the caveats expressed here. The best reason to teach military history, to my mind, isn't that the Battle of Gettysburg is necessarily more important than half a dozen other topics a student might study, but that it's more interesting, offering an exciting gateway - particularly for boys, whose… More »

I've been waiting to read something smart that contradicts this analysis, but I haven't found it. More »

Matt has an interesting post comparing Romney's rightward flip-flops to John Edwards' journey to the left over the last few years. He notes that "liberals are primed to believe that Edwards is sincere in his new, more liberal persona, since we tend to think that the New Edwards' stands are correct on the merits," and suggests that presumably the same should go for conservatives and Romney: "Becoming pro-life looks like a pander to me, but to people who find the… More »