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Conservatism’s enduring debates

Conservatism’s enduring debates

Not quite thirty years ago, I sketched out a book-length history of the American political right. I had read and enjoyed George Nash’s and Jay Sigler’s tomes, but felt they were both a little dated and had excluded essential thinkers and developments. I also felt that academe, which I was in training to join, had given the […]

Review: Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: I...

Review: Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group

I got this book (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2003) from a friend many years ago, but it sat on my shelf unread. Recently, I was thinking about this late friend and decided it was past time to crack The Iron Triangle. I study governance for a living, and I like investigative journalism and efforts […]

The perils of “doing something”

The perils of “doing something”

Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary about these problems—a tendency Banfield’s […]

A Book You Cannot Trust: Robert N. Winte...

A Book You Cannot Trust: Robert N. Winter-Berger’s The Washington Pay-Off

On June 8, 1960, the New York State attorney general Louis J. Lefkowitz enjoined Winter-Berger from the securities market. Why? Because Winter-Berger had defrauded folks by peddling non-existent stock to rich folks, to whom he passed himself off as a “prominent socialite.” The corporation and the miracle product he described did not exist. He made […]

First Among Equals: How George Washingto...

First Among Equals: How George Washington Became George Washington

George Washington was born to middling stock in Virginia in 1732. He was a “conventional Virginia provincial” whose world had a stable social order and agrarian political economy. A planter class led this stratified society. These gentlemen dressed, spoke, and behaved differently from others, and their mores owed much to the English motherland and to […]