U.S. History

Richard Rorty is a distinguished analytic philosopher, but you would never know it from this vulgar screed. Our author makes clear the basic assumptions of "infantile leftism," in Lenin's phrase, in a way that hardly stops short of self-parody.Richard Rorty is a distinguished analytic philosopher, but you would never know it from this vulgar screed. Our author makes clear the basic assumptions of "infantile leftism," in Lenin's phrase, in a way that hardly stops short of self-parody.

Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican sociologist now teaching at Harvard, does not like being termed a conservative for his views on black-white relations in the United States.

Johnson, a world-renowned journalist and popular historian, adopts a thoroughly Rothbardian account of the onset of the Depression. Like Rothbard, he finds the source of the collapse in irresponsible credit expansion.

Far from having been reformed, much less abolished, welfare continues to grow. The most recent example is the attempt by the Clinton administration to convince Americans that there is a "child care crisis," which can only be "solved" through expansion of government. The welfare state has become a deeply destructive but sadly unavoidable fact of life in modern society.

As usual, let us begin with a paradox. James McPherson, a leading historian of the Civil War, ardently supports the Union cause and views Abraham Lincoln as an outstanding champion of "positive liberalism."

Vindicating the Founders is better than I thought it would be. The author proceeds from an excellent idea. The framers have of late come under attack by leftists of various sorts.

While American "liberals" tend to view Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton as their political and philosophical idols, conservatives at the Weekly Standard magazine and elsewhere have begun touting Henry Clay as their first political icon.

In fact, the Roosevelt legacy is not individualism; it is certainly not liberty. His continuing legacy is one of unprecedented government intervention. Roosevelt crushed property rights. He constructed huge public works projects. He also helped lead the U.S. into its disastrous slide into imperialism and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in numerous foreign conflicts (and millions of foreigners). In reality, the leviathan state in all its evil owes much to TR.

The dispossession of the Indians—culminating in the late 1880s with the surviving tribes of the West being herded onto reservations—was the result of a corrupt and immoral relationship between certain Northern industrialists, particularly government-subsidized railroads, and the federal politicians whose careers they financed and promoted.

The centralized, executive state makes corruption at the top a political inevitability.