CRB: Days of rage, years of lies

The new summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books is in the mail and, thanks to our friends among its ranks, we are previewing four pieces from it this week. Following up on the gala tenth anniversary issue, the summer issue is full of excellent reviews and essays by prominent scholars.

Faithful Power Line readers know that the CRB is my favorite magazine. If you love to read and if you lean conservative, it is tailor-made for you. A subscription to the CRB costs less that $20 a year. Subscribe here and get immediate online access to the entire issue thrown in.

Bill Voegeli is one of the CRB’s senior editors and appears often in its pages. He is a man of long experience in the conservative movement, having worked for many years at the Olin Foundation, which did the honorable thing by following the wishes of its founder and going out of business. His Never Enough: American’s Limitless Welfare State may have been last year’s book of the year.

Bill is also a highly educated man of the right, and like all such he has been watching the left for a long time. He notices that some parts of it are not simply crazy; he notices in fact that some parts of it are responsible. In “Days of Rage, Years of Lies,” he distinguishes these responsible liberals from the rest, who are now alas gathered at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its immediate environs.

Perhaps the great Voegeli can help make the good ones an antidote to the powerful ones. But do not get your hopes up too high. Bill Voegeli’s are not. The radicals, who are crazy, and the responsible liberals, agree that “democracy” can be reduced to a single imperative: we get what we want.

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