Free Republic

Anyone who has read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America knows of his extraordinary mind. He was not only a wise, penetrating, and prophetic, but his was an aristocratic mind: magnanimous, urbane, and free from sectarian prejudice. Hence one should take all the more seriously his assessment of Islam: "I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so...

The editors of the Atlantic magazine pose a question in the May issue: "How does America look to foreign eyes?" A big part of the answer — in this month's Atlantic, at least — comes from South Dakota. The magazine engaged French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy to travel the nation and report what he found, in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who took a similar journey 200 years ago.

All manner of essays from the Left and Right, presented for your reading (and quoting) pleasure.. All EssaysQuotations Links to Related Topics

...Republicans unashamedly are talking up programs to serve the interests of people who do own something, or aspire to. The promise by politicians to protect the sanctity of private property is not exactly a new idea in American politics. It just got lost somewhere back there when environmental radicals started dictating how private land could be used, municipal authorities started using their eminent domain powers recklessly and lawyers became birds of prey, hunting for deep pockets to pick. That has been a dangerous trend, because the protection of private property has been fundamental to American economic and political development.... Thanks...

I was going to write this column about George Soros, but sometimes events overtake intentions. Beyond the three men, the subject is understanding America. Reagan understood his nation. Soros does not understand his adopted nation. But deHollan, another Hungarian who came to America nearly a half century ago, does understand this land. America has a talent, rare among the nations of the world, for finding greatness in her leaders at the most urgent of times. More than that, she has the talent of finding greatness in the hearts of ordinary men. Thomas Jefferson was a man of greatness all his...

An interesting and horrifying thing happened this Wednesday. The United States Supreme Court modified key portions of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and few citizens took notice. Admittedly, those portions include such minor and ambiguous clauses as "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" and "Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." According to the Court, Congress may indeed abridge these freedoms, even in the context that the authors of the Constitution specifically had in mind when the Amendment...

BEYOND TOCQUEVILLE, MYRDAHL, AND HARTZ: THE MULTIPLE TRADITIONS IN AMERICA ROGERS M. SMITH Yale University Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic "liberal democratic" society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870-1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the...