Is America in irreversible decline?

New Criterion editor and publisher Roger Kimball posed the question to “Visiting Critic” Conrad Black. Roger introduces Black and Black provides the answer to the question Roger posed in the New Criterion’s third annual Circle Lecture, posted online here and embedded below. Black discusses his lecture and other topics with New Criterion executive editor James Panero in an interview that is also posted at the link.

The email alerting readers to the video provides this biographical summary: “Conrad Black is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. The former head of the Argus and Hollinger corporate groups and of London’s Telegraph newspapers, Black is also the founder of Canada’s National Post. Black has been a member of the British House of Lords since 2001.”

It is an understatement to say that Black brings the perspective of history to the answer he frames in his lecture. It is learned. It is literate. It is thought-provoking. It is eloquent in the high style. It speaks with understandable bitterness about our criminal justice system. It puts in a good word for the the tax that incited the Boston Tea Party. By my lights it is funny in its own deadpan way. It may even be right. I found it well worth my time.

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