A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Conservatism

  • Douthat to the Times

    “Sam’s Club” Republican Ross Douthat has been tapped to replace evil neocon genius Bill Kristol on the New York Times op-ed page. I enjoy Douthat’s writing, which is generally thoughtful, and he has an interesting perspective as a conservative who seems genuinely concerned with addressing economic insecurity and inequality. Predictably, he’s a virtual heretic among Read more

  • Liberalism, conservatism, choice, and limits

    What now for conservatives? Andrew Bacevich says they should advocate restraint–economic, personal, cultural, and in the foreign policy sphere. He contrasts this with the liberal culture of “unchecked individual autonomy,” “Ponzi scheme” capitalism, and neoconservative foreign policy. Damon Linker replies that what Bacevich advocates is tantamount to a culture of authoritarianism. I agree with Linker Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • Pre-Christmas odds and ends

    The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately: Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See Read more

  • Blogs of Christmas past

    Since content will likely be light this coming week, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to offer up some representative posts from the previous four Decembers since I started blogging, as a kind of retrospective. (Note: some of these originally appeared on my first blog, “Verbum Ipsum,” but have been imported to WP; Read more

  • Forever war

    Michael Brendan Dougherty has a smart article in the new issue of The American Conservative about the post-election “whither conservatism” talk that has been roiling the Right. The one thing that doesn’t seem to be receiving much of the ballyhooed conservative re-thinking, Dougherty points out, is the Iraq war, and foreign policy more generally. Read more

  • Prospects for conservatives, “left” and otherwise

    Russell Arben Fox has a thoughtful meditation on the prospects for his brand of “left conservatism” in a bluer America. Hard to believe that we were talking about a permanent Republican majority four years ago. All the more reason to be wary of overconfident (or dire, depending on your view) pronouncements about the triumph of Read more

  • How I (sort of) joined the vast left-wing conspiracy: confessions of a pessimistic liberal

    In the wake of talk of a new conservative-libertarian fusionism on the right, these remarks from political theorist Jacob T. Levy make for interesting reading. I used to consider myself a libertarian, and even voted Republican in the late 90s and early oughts, but was soon driven away from the GOP for reasons to familiar Read more

  • Unhappy conservatives

    The American Conservative asked an eclectic group of thinkers on the Right (broadly speaking) to offer their endorsements for the election. Interestingly, by my count there are four Obama voters, two McCain voters, and twelve people who say they will either vote third party, write someone in, or not vote at all. This isn’t too Read more

  • Fear of a liberal planet

    Under some circumstances I might be sympathetic to the argument that handing both Congress and the presidency to the same party is a bad idea. After all, our system of government is based on the principle of checks and balances, and one-party rule can lead to corruption and abuse of power in short order. But Read more