Free Republic

Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality? Upton Sinclair was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his book as an attack on what he and other socialists termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.” Sinclair also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction...

Oh! and is all forgot? … Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? —William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age Almost twenty years ago, on one of my periodic assignments in Europe for The New York Times, I had a conversation over lunch one day with one of the paper’s older foreign correspondents that made a great impression on me. The war in Vietnam had recently ended—for the Americans, that is—and at lunch that day we fell to speculating about what long-term effects that conflict would have on the United States and its role in the world....