It’s no exaggeration to say that America is in the midst of one of its fiercest economic policy debates for some time. But the current quarrel between economic nationalists and free marketers extends beyond domestic policy. Whether conducted via long-form articles or duked out on X (formerly Twitter) by dirigiste senators and their free market critics, China looms large in the back-and-forth. The much-debated relationship between trade and national security forms part of that discussion. Yet so too do arguments about whether American policymakers in the late 1990s placed too much faith in mark ..read more

There is probably no more respected or prominent compassionate social critic of millennials and Gen Z than Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Since his book The Coddling of the American Mind blasted on the scene, validating conservative fears about cancel culture while staying squarely in the classical liberal tradition, Haidt has managed to do something few academic public intellectuals can: gain a wide, bipartisan public following while retaining the respect of academic intellectuals. Since the publication of that book, Haidt has continued his research into the mental health problems of the rising generati ..read more

The zeitgeist of the week, if we are to countenance viral memes, is this: “The Rich Get Richer, The Lazy Live for Free, and the Middle Class Pays for it All!” It’s catchy—no doubt in part because it isn’t overtly partisan. It’s also a modern take on an old and familiar refrain and therefore seems to strike a chord with the millions who glibly pass it along as a sort of common-sense observation that most people can identify with. But how true is it, really? Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose wife Mary famously penned Frankenstein) is credited with first coining the aphorism “the rich get richer, the ..read more

They call him Da Liu: Big Liu. A looser translation might be “the big kahuna,” the one who needs no introduction. Many American viewers of Netflix’s new interstellar drama, 3 Body Problem, are unfamiliar with the trilogy of books it’s based on (collectively titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past) and their author, Liu Cixin. But in his native country, he is a literary sensation, the kingpin of Chinese science fiction. Science fiction, in turn, is no escapist diversion in China. It is an imaginative exercise pursued in deadly earnest, an expression of national aspirations to technological supremacy ..read more

Last month I was at a book launch in Washington, DC. This was an event for Republicans—sparsely attended. Older gentlemen and ladies who may have been notable once were obviously struggling with anonymity, looking for people they themselves might know without looking too eager to everyone else. Of course, there were almost no young people except the waiting staff. I knew maybe five people there and wondered what they were doing there; and vice versa. This was a cultural event, so that adds to the embarrassment in the most transactional city in America. What else to do but network halfheartedly ..read more

Every new regime not born from revolutionary violence must win the support of an elite to survive. Mere theories of sound social arrangements do not suffice. A powerful cohort must be invested in the regime’s success, ready to uphold its ideals. Lacking allies to enforce its vision, a regime’s framework may ironically undermine the principles it is designed to uphold. An entrenched opposing elite can turn the discretion inherent in all political settlements against the objectives of their proponents. In American history, for instance, consider how a Federalist elite, entrenched in the federal ..read more

A joke told often in Budapest says that World War III will be lost by whichever side Hungary is on. Balázs Orbán, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (the two are not related), notes in his new book, Hussar Cut, that the political compromise of 1867 that incorporated Hungary into the Austrian Empire “involved the voluntary surrender of our independent foreign policy, so we had no say on whether or not to participate in the first great global military conflagration of the twentieth century.” Hungary had little choice in the Second World War, either: in 1944 it fell under Germ ..read more

I was in broad sympathy with Professor McGinnis’s recent Law & Liberty review of Ingrid Robeyns’s book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, though I am somewhat less sanguine than he about the benefits of wealth (beyond a certain level). I would put it like this: while increased wealth above a certain level is not guaranteed to increase happiness, or what is now routinely called human flourishing, attempts to limit wealth to that level are almost guaranteed to result in increased human unhappiness. I was struck, however, by the following sentence in the review: While the left ..read more

Daniel Miller has offered us a critique of American political culture by way of European reactionary thought, with an emphasis on analogies from the French Revolution to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His argument is primarily conceptual, meaning that he identifies key concepts as primary drivers for the events. The central and eponymous concept, American counterrevolution, is never directly defined. But toward the end of the essay he slips in the following unannounced: Perhaps the most important shared fact [between the French Revolution and American counterrevolution] is the presence of the ..read more

The year 2023 witnessed two significant anniversaries related to the life and thought of the political philosopher Leo Strauss: the 70th anniversary of the publication of his best-known and most synoptic work, Natural Right and History (1953), and the 50th anniversary of his death in 1973. A figure of controversy in his life, Strauss and his students (so-called “Straussians”) remain polarizing today. On the one hand, left-wing academics and the journalists who endlessly recirculate clichés and terrible simplifications see in Strauss-influenced scholars an elitist and anti-democratic cabal; tho ..read more