Everyone’s going after Anne Coulter—and rightly so—for her racist comments yesterday on the “Hannity” show. Asked why liberals and Democrats are up in arms over the sexual harassment allegations that have been leveled against GOP candidate Herman Cain, Coulter said: Our blacks are so much better than their blacks.  To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow… That “our blacks” is especially gruesome. Sounds like the proprietary claim a fancy housewife would make, ca. 1960 (or 1860), about her black maid: “my girl” or something like that. But if you can suspend disbelief—or disgust— for a minute, there’s something in what Coulter is saying that’s worth paying attention to for it […]

On Thursday next week, the CUNY Center for the Humanities, The Nation, and the Roosevelt Institute will be hosting a public conversation about The Reactionary Mind, featuring me and Chris Hayes, host of the excellent new program Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC.  The details are here, but if you’re feeling link-fatigue, it’ll be on Thursday, October 6, at 7 pm, in the Martin Segal Theater of the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Avenue, between 34th and 35th).  Make sure to get there early as seating may be limited. And if you do come, please make sure to say hello or, if we haven’t met personally, introduce yourself. And if you can, please share this information widely. In anticipation of […]

A few weeks ago Andrew Sullivan complained—and not for the first time—that contemporary conservatism has grown too ideological and fundamentalist, abandoning the tradition of Burke and Hayek. You know, the tradition of prudence and restraint that abjures fanaticism and counsels moderation, that eschews the grand designs of the left in favor of the evolutionary, piecemeal reforms of the right. You know, that tradition that says this: “A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency.” (Hayek, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 61) And this: “Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today…But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to […]