Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

This article of liberal faith—that conservatism is not just wrong but angry, mean and, well, bad—produces one paradox after another.

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history—perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

How to understand the conservative desire to actually abolish welfare, if it is not to punish the poor? The argument that it would increase self-reliance and thus ultimately reduce poverty is dismissed as meanness

This is the work of politics—understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

Why should Jews, a people with such an epic tradition, present themselves to America solely as victims of the greatest crime in history?

So why not? Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw and concede? Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily r

Time, March 26, 2006

Liberals suffer incurably from naïveté, the stupidity of the good heart.

Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and as mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me.