Free Republic

If public-school teachers spent more time teaching in classrooms and less time community-organizing in political war rooms, maybe taxpayers wouldn't feel as ripped off as they do. Before the Big Labor bosses start complaining about "teacher-bashing," let's be clear: An increasing number of rank-and-file teachers feel exactly the same way. Retired New York teacher Vinne Cusimano, who was required to pay forced union dues in order to work, wrote me this week after receiving the March 2011 edition of his union's monthly publication. The cover of the New York State United Teachers magazine reads: "Defend What Matters! Educate. Collaborate. AGITATE."...

Edmund Burke, one of history's greatest conservatives, warned that abstractions are the enemy of responsible government. "I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals," Burke wrote. "A statesman differs from a professor in a university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas." Alas for all of us and for American conservatism in particular, the new Republican majority that took control of the House on Wednesday is embarked on an experiment in government by abstractions. Many in...

In England, youths are rioting. In Portugal, labor unions staged a national strike last Wednesday. A little over a month ago, France and Greece were subjected to large, violent demonstrations and riots. A common thread? In each of these countries, the unrest was engendered by economic austerity measures proposed and/or enacted by government. A far more salient common thread? The morally corruptive nature of the progressivist ideology. As the four recent examples, along with others occurring all over the world illustrate, a group of like-minded "thinkers" is emerging. It is a group composed in equal parts of economic illiteracy and...

'Never mind." That, in a nutshell, is the White House's new position on domestic oil exploration. In March, President Obama announced that he would allow -- or at least entertain -- some new oil development off the Atlantic Coast and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. This week he reversed himself, saying such exploration is now off the table for at least five years. Only the most black-hearted cynics among us would even contemplate the notion that Obama had his re-election prospects in, say, Florida in mind when he made his decision. Then again, some believed that Obama's initial decision...

Obama knew full well from the beginning that his healthcare plans wouldn't be popular. However, Obama is an ideologue, and when popular opinion clashes with his ideology, ideology wins out. Moreover, Obama had a plan, intended to address what his administration saw as the key failure of HillaryCare...

Have you ever wondered what the differences are between conservative and leftist cities?  I'm not talking about the differences between skyscraper- and coffee-shop-heavy metropolises and old-fashioned small towns in middle America—I mean the differences between major U.S. cities that tend to lean right vs. left. Well, Travel + Leisure Magazine just released their America’s Favorite Cities 2010 survey results, which score and rank 35 major U.S. cities by 10 categories and 54 subcategories. I decided to examine the extent to which a city’s general political affiliation—on a leftist to conservative spectrum—relates to their scores on the survey’s categories. To determine...

"I don't think people carry around with them a fixed ideology." That's what the president said. Standing up before the country in the wake of a nationwide repudiation, asked if there was anything he could learn from what the voters had said, he responded that Republican and Democrat didn't matter. And maybe they don't. But then he said, "I don't think people carry around with them a fixed ideology." What an interesting arrogance. What an exquisite contempt. What a fundamental misunderstanding of both the American heart and human nature. Because, yes Mr. President, most people do "carry around with them...

It's easy to use the deceased to claim support for one's positions. The dead aren't around to deny, rebut, and refute false or misleading statements. William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual giant and "maker" of the conservative movement, has of late become a crutch for statists and ruling-class elites to denigrate the Tea Parties and the surge of the constitutional, small-government conservative movement. Liberals trying to smear the Tea Party cause and constitutional, small-government conservative candidates by referring to Buckley are, however, attempting to rewrite history to suit their own agendas and ideology. For example, E.J. Dionne writes in Monday's Washington...

Two or three years ago, if I tried to tell people that the problems in the public schools should be blamed on the bosses at the top, that is, the Education Establishment, I might not get too far. People would object, what about the unconcerned parents? The lazy kids? The unions? What about rock ‘n roll, drugs, the internet, cell phones, and teenage hormones? Surely, the elite educators mean well. They just get caught up in fads. You can’t suppose they let the schools get dumb on purpose. Well, that would mean a conspiracy; and that’s crazy. All my research,...

It is time for a "Team B" approach to Islamist ideology. The strategy has worked before, against a similarly determined threat to freedom. In 1976, George H.W. Bush, then director of central intelligence, invited a group of known skeptics about the strategy of detente to review the classified intelligence regarding Soviet intentions and capabilities. The point was to provide an informed second opinion on U.S. policy toward the Kremlin. The conclusions of this experimental Team B study differed sharply from the government's regnant theory. The skeptics found that, pursuant to its communist ideology, the Soviet Union was determined to secure...

In a review of the book "The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis" by Robert R Reilly , Spengler raises some excellent theological questions about why Islam is a cultural wasteland. Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice. In the normative Muslim view of things, Allah personally and immediately directs the motion of every molecule by his ineffable and incomprehensible will, according to the al-Ghazali synthesis, directly and without the mediation of natural law. Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes,...

In "The Conservative Mind"(1953),a founding document of the American conservative movement,Russel Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed,and even that such thought was highly intelligent--a demonstration very much needed at the time.

As we celebrate Independence Day, I, perhaps like many others today, find myself pondering its significance. While many may be thinking back to the 1770s and the great many personal sacrifices and contributions American families made at the time toward the establishment of the United States, I have found my thoughts to be rooted in present times and, at the core, the seemingly ongoing trend away from independence. I believe there to be a fatal flaw in today’s groupthink. The flaw may simply be that there is too much groupthink. For a country founded in the spirit of autonomy, it...

Today's liberal is the political expression of postmodernism and those we know as liberals tend to represent all the characteristics of postmodern thinking foisted on them by contemporary higher education, exposure to modern media etc. To successfully thwart modern (not classical) liberalism, some understanding of postmodern thought and its vulnerabilities must be considered and acted upon. Using this line of reasoning has helped me understand the liberal mindset and the stubborn incapacity of liberals to see something other than the truth of things. I haven't made many conversions, but the postmodern argument helps me make inroads as it takes the...

'Obama Struggling to Show He's in Control," reads the headline on The Washington Post's story on Barack Obama's Thursday press conference, where most of the questions were about the Gulf oil spill. "Defensive, unauthoritative and equivocal," wrote Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford of Obama's performance. "He came across as a beleaguered bureaucrat in damage control." Uh-oh. People, even people in the Obama-friendly press, are beginning to say that the oil spill is Obama's Katrina. That it destroys his reputation for competence. Obama's press conference -- his first in the White House in 309 days -- didn't make him look any more...

“A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women,” I wrote in a 2006 “Spengler” essay about Iranian prostitution. “The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999.” It is a cultural marker of inestimable importance that the one Arab whose name every American knows is Rima...

Elena Kagan ’81 got drunk on election night in 1980. Standing in the Brooklyn Academy of Music with her vodka and tonic, she watched Walter Cronkite usher in the news that Democratic candidate Elizabeth Holtzman had lost the race for one of New York’s Senate seats. And then she sat down and wept. Three decades later, Kagan is the first female solicitor general of the United States and one of the leading candidates for President Barack Obama’s nomination to fill the seat of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who is due to retire when the court’s term...

I wish to present a proposition for reasoned debate. I think conservatives should be able to agree on it, but I fear many here do not in their bones accept it. I think it is a key to our ideological conflicts and the political and economic diseases of our time. Proposition - the income from capital is entirely legitimate. It flows to its recipients because they entirely deserve it for the valuable service they have provided. Any attempt to outlaw it, redistribute it, destroy it, or legislate it out of existence or all recognition, is unjust on its face. It...

In his masterful second volume study of Hitler, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Ian Kershaw discusses a phenomenon called "working towards the Führer," in which every Nazi Party organization, member and office automatically, with little or no prompting or prodding by Hitler or his inner circle, worked to realize the ends and policies articulated by Hitler before and after he rose to power in 1933. It was automatic, because to disagree with or have reservations about a single, even minor aspect of Nazi ideology was to court reprimand, censure, dismissal, or even death. Agreement with those ends and policies was nearly a...

I’m a glutton for punishment. I could have decided to slouch along the sidelines of ministry and watch the many controversies within the church zip past. Perhaps peeking over the pew on occasion and catching a slight breeze off the mini-tornadoes of debate that exist under the umbrella that is American Evangelicalism. Public prayer, the roles of women, the role of the Holy Spirit, capital punishment, responses to poverty, HIV/AIDS, divorce, adult or infant baptism, health or wealth . . . . . . But you see I’m optimistic to a fault so I have decided to throw myself into...