Free Republic

Conservatism is a thinking mans ideology. It requires understanding and wisdom, research and knowledge, and the ability and willingness to judge right from wrong. It requires a moral compass, a fortitude for righteousness, and above all a love of liberty. To be a true conservative the value of the individual must be nourished and a fierce independence cultivated that can withstand the petty criticisms, persecutions and mockeries of those who have yet to see the light and embrace the truth. The conservative ideology cannot be separated from logic or from common sense. To me being a political blogger and commentator...

Frustrating! That's the appropriate word for what is happening in the wake of the Osama bin Laden raid. Besides the precision of the Navy SEALs, the big story to emerge from the action is that coerced interrogation gave the CIA vital information used to track bin Laden to his lair. Current CIA Chief Leon Panetta has confirmed that.Of course, that exposition is embarrassing to the left, including President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton, who are all on record as saying coerced interrogation does not work. Apparently, they were wrong in a big way.The nails-on-the-blackboard part of...

From the moment Barack Obama took center stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the world has been busily trying to decipher the man. No one has been more busy reading Obama in the years since than the chair of the Harvard History Department, the esteemed Dr. James Kloppenberg. At numerous symposia, on both sides of the Atlantic, he has shared his distinctive insights on our 44th president. In his new book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, Kloppenberg has assembled his insights into a misreading of Obama so sincere and so profound that it causes one...

When I covered George W. Bush’s White House, my job was made easier by the simplicity of the subject. The president had a few defining mantras — Cut taxes! Rally the base! Terrorists hate freedom! With us or against us! — and most of his decisions could be understood, even predicted, by applying one of the overarching philosophies. With President Obama, there is no such luxury. The political right is befuddled as it tries to explain him: First, Obama was a tyrant and a socialist; now he’s a weakling who refuses to lead. The political left is almost as confused,...

When I first read Paul Johnson’s seminal work on the History of the Modern World, now published under a different title, I was thunderstruck by the assembled evidence of the rape, pillage and murder of those unfortunate to be governed by the Russian Communist state. The precise numbers are difficult to ascertain with authority but Johnson’s sources indicate that 10% of the population were subjected to Stalin’s penitentiary establishments. If you reckon around a million died in the Gulag every year between 1936 and Stalin’s death in 1953 that would account for 17 million of his fellow, and no doubt...

With quiet dignity a hooded figure revealed himself from the protective ring of trees. Mounting a small hillock he faced the sea of expectant faces. A measured sweep of his hands pulled back the hood to reveal a wizened face framed by a long white beard. For a long moment not a sound was heard or movement evident in the crowd. The robed figure examined the myriad of faces before him with watery blue eyes that shone with intelligence and understanding. What he saw before him was hope. Hope on faces that only hours before had expressed only despair and...

America is an increasingly conservative nation, by ideology and by political affiliation, according to polling results from the Gallup Organization. While conservatives have long outnumbered liberals and moderates across the U.S., the study sheds new light on state-by-state patterns. The map below shows the pattern for the 50 states. Mississippi is the first state with more than 50% conservative identification, with Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, and Utah approaching that level, and Arkansas, South Carolina, North Dakota, Louisiana, and South Dakota (the rest of the top ten conservative states) 45% or higher. Conservatives outnumber liberals in even the most liberal-leaning states (excluding...

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...