IN THE November 19, 2015, ISSUE
Thankful at Sixty
If memory serves, I first heard about National Review watching Firing Line in the 1980s. I went down to the local drugstore looking for a copy, and to my chagrin ...
Magazine
Also In This Issue
Features
Fusionism, Then and Now
‘Who lost the libertarians?” It’s a question you hear a lot from conservatives of late. The reason should be obvious to anyone who has followed the conservative movement’s internecine intellectual ...
Contemporary Classical: A Listening
Some years ago, I was covering a concert at Carnegie Hall, whose program included a new work. A world premiere. When it had ended, I leaned over to the critic ...
Family: The Crucial Institution
Married white Christians were the demographic core of the country when National Review was founded, and still are the demographic core of the conservative movement it midwifed. The difference in ...
The Great Enrichment
The commercial bourgeoisie — the middle class of traders, inventors, and managers, the entrepreneur and the merchant, the inventor of carbon-fiber materials and the contractor remodeling your bathroom, the improver ...
Will We Govern Ourselves?
I take a personal interest in the Founders’ revival, since I helped start it. My first biography, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, was generously reviewed by a major scholar, Joseph ...
The Future Is Free
The battle cry of this magazine notwithstanding, there is no capital-“H” Hegelian History, and nothing — certainly not political liberty — is inevitable. It was far from inevitable that a ...
A People, Not Just an Idea
‘America is not just a country,” said the rock singer Bono, in Pennsylvania in 2004: “It’s an idea.” Bono is a decent, thoughtful, and public-spirited man. I didn’t choose his ...
Naysayers
Alvin wasn’t in much of a hurry, or he and Arthur Stuart would’ve jumped over Turkey Creek and continued on their way. But Alvin was using this trip to quiz ...
When Law Began to Rule
It could well be argued that the signing by King John, and subsequent issuing, of Magna Carta in 1215 was the most decisive episode in English history. Contemporaries were in ...
Forward to the Future
Late last month, American pop culture celebrated “Back to the Future Day” — marking the date, 10/21/2015, to which Marty McFly leaps forward from the Reagan ’80s in Back to ...
Long Live the Nation-State
Recently, Singapore celebrated 50 years of nationhood. The success of this remarkable country is a vivid exemplar of the proposition that we still live in a world of nation-states.
Singapore’s birth ...
What Would Eisenhower Do?
American foreign policy today is in disarray. Faced with three major challenges to Western democracy — a restive Russia, an economically ascendant China, and Islamic extremism emanating from a strife-torn ...
Dangers on the Horizon
In these days that in many ways are similar to the years of decadence and blindness foreshadowing the two great wars of the past century, our attentions are focused mainly ...
Our Bungled War on Terror
Speaking to a joint session of Congress a week after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 atrocities, President George W. Bush outlined the only strategy that has ever ...
The Apology Policy
President Barack Obama strutted into the Oval Office utterly convinced of his moral rectitude. Unlike his predecessors, Obama would make policy based on an exquisitely calibrated conscience, sensitivity to constitutional ...
The Mideast’s Plastic Hour
A “plastic hour,” in Karl Marx’s useful phrase, occurs when the course of events is so confused and confusing that it could go this way or that, which is the ...
Black America and the Right
While not as uncommon as popularly supposed, the black conservative is ever considered an oxymoron, thought by most people left of center to be deluded at best and evil at ...
Climate Coercion
Predicting catastrophe is a lucrative business. By doing so, the big environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club, have grown ...
Still Thwarting History
When he launched National Review 60 years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. famously declared an intention not to make history but to halt it. The magazine, he asserted, “stands athwart ...
Freedom’s Framework
‘The natural progress of things,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Whatever our differences, William F. Buckley Jr. and I often found ourselves ...
The Regulators’ Yoke
Earlier this year, I published a book called “By the People” that laid out a plan for systematic civil disobedience of stupid and pointless regulations. It is a subversive position. ...
The Twitter Trap
Stop me if you’ve heard this story: A die-hard progressive living in a liberal enclave (usually when this story is told, it’s about the late New Yorker film critic Pauline ...
Conservatism at a Crossroads
It is the best and the worst of times for conservatives. Those who believe in fiscal responsibility, smaller government, individual freedom, strong defense, and reverence for Western traditions and American ...
A Conservative-Media Revolution
When I arrived in New York City 28 years ago to begin my national radio program, my objective was to have the most-listened-to show in the country. At that time, ...
Books, Arts & Manners
Books That Shaped Our Minds
William Kristol
The Republic of Plato, translated with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom (Basic, 512 pp., $22)
In the fall of 1970, a freshman at Harvard with “sophomore standing” ...
Sections
Thankful at Sixty
If memory serves, I first heard about National Review watching Firing Line in the 1980s. I went down to the local drugstore looking for a copy, and to my chagrin ...
Onward
Sixty years ago, WFB said of this brand-new journal that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop” — in the spirit not of a bearded zealot carrying a hand-lettered sign, but ...