Political science

A Dry Run for Tyranny

Featured image The proto-fascists among us have delighted in issuing “emergency” orders relating to the coronavirus. These have included, among others, shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. The Governor of Minnesota went so far as to issue an “emergency” order prohibiting all residents of the state from leaving their houses without his permission. Many have speculated that statists’ overreaction to covid has been a dry run for more “emergencies” to come. Indeed »

With the Claremont Institute

Featured image My friend Bruce Sanborn was chairman of the Claremont Institute for something like 20 years, if not more. That is a wild guess — Bruce is traveling in Croatia or I would have the exact number for you. Bruce recruited Tom Klingenstein to the board and stepped down upon the accession of Tom to the chairmanship a few years back. Over that approximately 20-year period, Bruce and I attended the »

Liberalism’s Endless Aggression Against America

Featured image Liberals get very testy when you suggest they lack patriotism, or worse, that they are ashamed of or actually hate the country deep down inside. But even the New York Times can’t conceal this any longer: A Fourth of July Symbol of Unity That May No Longer Unite Politicians of both parties have long sought to wrap themselves in the flag. But something may be changing: Today, flying the flag »

Relevant classic texts (3)

Featured image I just finished reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time. I read it over the past two years or so in weekly lunch meetings with my friend Bruce Sanborn. Carleton College’s Professor Larry Cooper, also a friend, served as our preceptor. We used the terrific edition translated, edited, and introduced by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop that is published by the University of Chicago Press. Like »

What Do the People Think?

Featured image I’m looking over the 189-page results of a recent Harvard-Harris poll of 1,778 voters conducted last week, and there are some interesting findings to pass along: Andrew Cuomo: Very Favorable/Favorable— 31%; Unfavorable/Very Unfavorable—42% (Note: the poll finished on Feb. 25, before most of the sexual harassment stories hit the media.) This question is interesting for its even split: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The 2020 election »

Why The Polls May Be Wrong, in One Chart

Featured image The handful of “outlier” polls, like the Democracy Institute poll out over the weekend that finds Trump tied or ahead in the popular vote, all have one thing in common: they don’t rely on traditional polling sample methods such as telephone calls, email or other internet contact. They are coming up with estimates derived from a number of techniques, mostly proprietary, that may presage the future of opinion surveys if »

Beneath the Top Line Poll Numbers

Featured image The first thing to understand about the Democratic Party today is that its shift to the left has occurred chiefly among white Democrats. This may be the hidden weakness that delivers the election to Trump. Let’s start with a new chart from Zach Goldberg, who notes survey data from the spring about Democratic voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas. What it shows is revealing: white Democrats are the most »

Failed States, Failed Cities, Failed Parties?

Featured image We’re familiar with the designation of places like Somalia as “failed states,” but can’t we equally recognize failed cities when we see them? New York City in the 1970s, when it needed a federal bailout, was one example from our past, and New York’s fiscal woes were closely connected with its larger social problems of crime, welfare dependency, and all the other factors that diminished the shine of the Big »

Our Orwellian Nightmare Come True

Featured image The Cato Institute has released a poll on self-censorship conducted by the highly respected YouGov survey unit that finds 62 percent of Americans say they have political opinions they are afraid to speak because they fear giving offense or losing their jobs. Moreover, as the reports notes, this represents an increase from the last such poll taken in 2017: “The share of Americans who self‐​censor has risen several points since 2017 »

Feeling the Bern in California

Featured image My pals at the Institute of Governmental Studies here at UC Berkeley (where I remain a fellow against all odds—story to follow some day soon) today released their latest poll on the state of the presidential race here in the once Golden State ahead of the March primary. I know the IGS pollster, Mark DiCamilo, quite well (in fact we shared an office for a time), and I think he »

New Social Science of Note

Featured image I try to keep up with some social science, partly for the amusement value, and partly because social science is sometimes useful for proving the obvious (which is also amusing). But I’ve been falling behind in posting highlights, so it is time to catch up. First up, do you think it is really necessary to prove that good looking people enjoy a lot of advantages in life? Apparently this proposition »

Getting Populism Right

Featured image Modern democracies are said to be in the grip of “populism” that the dictionary defines as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Most of the learned commentary from academia and the news media describe populism as a harbinger of the apocalypse, a threat to democracy, and the second coming of fascism, all stemming from racism and »

Rewriting Tony Bennett

Featured image The Wall Street Journal has adapted Charles Kesler’s editorial in the forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books — we’ll be getting to a few highlights ourselves next week — into the column “California’s biggest cities confront a ‘defecation crisis'” (subhead: “Lawmakers ban plastic straws as a far worse kind of waste covers the streets of San Francisco and L.A.”). Having turned one of the most beautiful cities in »

Found: The Stupidest Political Science Study Ever

Featured image You know how the left is obsessed with proving that Trump’s election is entirely owing to Russian Kallusion. Now we have empirical social science to prove it! At last! From the “peer-reviewed” internet journal First Monday (I’ve never heard of it either) comes this new study from several academics at the University of Tennessee: “Internet Research Agency Twitter Activity Predicted 2016 Election Polls.” The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is the »

Do We Still “Hold These Truths”?

Featured image On the first page of Natural Right and History (1953) Leo Strauss asks: Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those “truths to be self-evident”? About a generation ago, an American diplomat could still say that “the natural and the divine foundation of the rights of man . . . is self-evident to all Americans.” Well what »

The Hard Lasch the Left Deserves

Featured image Don’t ask me to explain why just now, but lately I reread Christopher Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995 shortly after his death. I recall disliking the book somewhat back then, in part because I had a bias against Lasch, who not only sympathized with the New Left in the 1960s, but whose 1978 book The Culture of Narcissism was said to be one of »

Uhlmann’s Conquest

Featured image A week or ten days back we linked to Michael Uhlmann’s speech to the Claremont Institute on “The Struggle Ahead“—the “struggle” being the ongoing political battle to preserve our constitutional order from the predations of the contemporary left that hates the Constitution and its principles. But we were remiss in not including an excerpt from Claremont Institute president Ryan Williams’ introduction of Michael, which offered a summary of some of Michael’s »