Political science

Ambassadors, Presidents and Double Standards

Featured image Steve marks the contrast between Biden’s confused UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who called out anti-Semitism “clearly and forcefully” at the United Nations. Consider also the contrast between Thomas-Greenfield and Ronald Reagan’s UN Ambassador, lifelong Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick “studied totalitarianism all her life and was aware of its tensile strengths and subtle ruses for maintaining power,” wrote Peter Collier in Political Woman: The Big »

Civic Education, at the Highest Level

Featured image Some readers may recall my earlier announcement that next semester (starting in January) I’ll be filling the very large shoes of Prof. Ted McAllister at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. (Ted sadly passed away after a long illness last winter.) I gave a talk to the incoming class of graduate students back in August, which I turned into a podcast here (in case you were living in a cave »

Spain Goes to the Polls (Updated)

Featured image Spain is holding a national election today, and polls indicate right of center parties are in the lead. We should start getting results fairly soon. We’ll update this post as we get some actual vote counts and exit polls. In the meantime, cosmopolitan election-watcher extraordinaire Henry Olsen has a handy guide on Twitter to Spain’s political landscape you may wish to take in: Happy Spanish Election Day! Yes, today Spain »

The eternal meaning of Independence Day (2)

Featured image President Calvin Coolidge celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. The following paragraph, however, is particularly relevant to the challenge that confronts us in the variants of the progressive dogma that pass themselves off today »

Podcast: PLU Class Session 8—The Federalist & the Judiciary

Featured image Settle down class, time for our next Power Line University lesson. This week we take up how The Federalist explains Article III, the judiciary, and especially the nowadays familiar power of judicial review, which is nowhere specified in the text of the Constitution, and was in fact an issue of controversy and confusion at the time of the founding. So we start our investigation with Federalist #78, where Alexander Hamilton »

Podcast: PLU Lesson One—The Federalist, Nos 1 – 9

Featured image Lucretia and I held the first “classroom” for PLU (Power Line University) yesterday, with 110 people ultimately tuning in live for our first formal session on The Federalist Papers. We had a couple of technical difficulties—for some reason we kept failing to get the Chat window working right—and we had some hiccups admitting some live questions and comments from viewers, but we hope to have these ironed out for our »

Netanyahu’s statesmanship

Featured image Once and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Bibi: My Story was published in mid-October. Mosaic’s Jonathan Silver has just posted the last of Netanyahu’s series of book-plugging podcasts with American hosts here on Stitcher and elsewhere on other platforms. Recorded on December 22, this one is slightly different from the rest: Rather than focus on his early life as depicted in the memoir, or on the current international and »

What Are the Pollsters Missing?

Featured image The most remarkable finding of the latest Wall Street Journal poll on the mid-term election is the yuuuge swing of suburban women toward the GOP since August: The new survey shows that white women living in suburban areas, who make up 20% of the electorate, now favor Republicans for Congress by 15 percentage points, moving 27 percentage points away from Democrats since the Journal’s August poll. That is one whopping »

Toasted Biden and the Polls

Featured image John notes below the latest “mainstream” polls showing both Biden and the Democrats reaching the burnt toast stage of this election cycle, but amidst the lingering questions about the accuracy of polling these days, it should be noted that the outcome of the midterms presents a huge dilemma for Democrats no matter how the election turns out. If Democrats get drowned in a wave, they face the serious problem of »

A newer science of politics

Featured image In Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent praises the comprehensive understanding advanced by Aristotle in his Politics: Aristotle’s Politics gives a description and analysis of political life that in a certain way is exhaustive—in any case more complete and subtle than any subsequent description or analysis. The bringing to light of the elements of the city, the critical and impartial analysis of the claims of »

The Elephant In the Room

Featured image The Elephant In the Room, subtitled “Donald Trump and the Future of the Republican Party,” is a collection of essays on that subject edited by Andrew Busch and William Mayer, professors at Claremont McKenna and Northeastern University, respectively. There are nine essays in total. In addition to Busch and Mayer, contributors include Glenn Reynolds and Charles Kesler, among others. I contributed the least substantial essay to the collection, titled by »

Comeback for Dems? Not So Fast

Featured image To listen to the Democrats’ media cheerleaders, Biden and his party have their mojo back, and can now look forward to turning around their dismal mid-term election prospects. Paul Krugman thinks Democrats may have actually saved western civilization! It seems, though, that the voters haven’t yet got the memo, which is no surprise since public trust in the media is now below used-car salesman levels. As Charles Lipson pointed out, »

Getting Right With Burke

Featured image Listeners to the 3WHH podcast will know that “Lucretia” and I have long divided on the question of Edmund Burke. To paraphrase something William F. Buckley once said about Harry Jaffa, if you think it is difficult to argue with Lucretia, just try agreeing with her—it’s nearly impossible. Back in our grad school days we liked to make fun of the leftist pop psychology popular at the time that everything »

The (Very) Early Line

Featured image Let us pause on this holiday weekend (Father’s Day today, Juneteenth tomorrow) to bask in the glory that is our supremely eloquent president: How can anyone think this can go on much longer? If you look around very closely, you can find a few perceptive Democrats who are worried that Democrats aren’t just looking at a bad election this year, but also in 2024, when the Senate map is much »

The Dem Midterm Wipeout Watch (4)

Featured image Last week my pals at the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at Berkeley held a panel on “(Why) Are Democrats Losing the Latino Vote?” You may pick up the subtle aspect of the way the question is presented, as lots of progressives think there’s nothing to see in changing hispanic vote patterns—that the results in Florida, for example, are just those Castro-hating Cubans, who aren’t really Latino at all. »

This Party Will Not Fight for King and Country

Featured image Students of the disastrous interwar appeasement will recall the famous 1933 Oxford University debate resolution which carried heavily in the affirmative: “This house will not fight for King and country.” Today one can well ask that question of Democrats, who always bristle when you question their patriotism. The Quinnipiac University poll is out with a new survey this week which shows strong American support for ending Russian oil imports, as »

Leo Strauss on Churchill

Featured image There is no Churchill on the scene and there is no Hitler. Over the past week, however, I have heard the words of Leo Strauss on the death of Winston Churchill echoing in my head. Strauss made these remarks in the sixth session of his Introduction to Political Philosophy course at the University of Chicago upon hearing of Churchill’s death on January 25, 1965 (per Catherine Zuckert here). It may »