New York Review of Books | November 9, 2017 Review of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla I OWE my marriage to identity politics. In 1960, I was born into a world where openly homosexual Americans were legally banned from federal employment, informally banned from much private employment, terrorized on the streets,…
Reason Magazine | June 2012 Review of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 400 pages, $27 UNLESS you live in a cave, you know the controversial work and reputation of Charles Murray. Losing Ground, published in 1984, proposed eliminating welfare as we knew it and became the template for conservative welfare reform. The…
The New York Times Book Review | October 7, 2011 Years ago Irving Kristol, the prime mover of American neoconservatism, said to me, in typical aphoristic style: “The orthodox are always right.” What he meant, I think, is that the enduring truths of traditionalism may at times be hard to grasp, but they endure for a…
Democracy Journal | Summer 2009 Review of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History, by Patrick Allitt • Yale University Press • 2009 • 336 pages • $35 IT IS the summer of 2008. I am watching the telecast of the Republican convention with a sinking feeling. Here is Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts (repeat: Massachusetts),…
The New York Times Book Review | May 17, 2009 Review of A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression, by Richard A. Posner “THIS RECESSION,” President Obama said recently, “was not caused by a normal downturn in the business cycle. It was caused by a perfect storm of irresponsibility and poor…
New York Times Book Review | October 7, 2007 THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era. Edited by Charles W. Dunn. ISI Books. Paper, $15. DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS. By Brian C. Anderson. ISI Books. $25. BEFORE there was a Heritage Foundation or a Federalist Society, or a Cato or Claremont or…
New York Times Book Review | September 3, 2006 MY friends Jenny and Greg were still digesting the news that Jenny was pregnant with triplets when, only moments later, their fertility doctor sat them down. After recounting the many things that might go wrong in a triple pregnancy, he said, “You really should consider reducing.” Overwhelmed…
Reason | November 2000 [Review of The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession, by Harrison G. Pope Jr., Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia, New York: The Free Press, 286 pages, $25] BY THE TIME I graduated from high school, I had reached my full height-–not quite five feet, eight inches–-and I weighed 105…
REASON | February 2000 [Review of Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal] LATELY I have begun to understand how a Methodist must feel when everyone he meets calls him a Lutheran. People often describe me as a libertarian. All right, it’s true that I often write in a skeptical vein about government. Yes, I have come…
Los Angeles Times Book Review | October 31, 1999 TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting…