November 19, 2015

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

‘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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 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 ...

‘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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

  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” ...

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 ...