Free Republic

OP-ED COLUMNIST In this country we have hotels that are democratized versions of European palaces. We have parks that are democratized versions of royal hunting grounds. And we have the novels of Saul Bellow, which are European novels of ideas adapted to the idiom of the American wisenheimer. So much of the best American culture has been an imitation, adaptation or rejection of European forms and ideas. But Bellow's death reminds us that we're now living in a unipolar moment, culturally as well as politically. Today's writers and artists are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a...

June 13, 2004 'What's the Matter With Kansas?': Heartland SecurityBy JOSH CHAFETZ WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By Thomas Frank. 306 pp. Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24. IKE the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits (Ann Coulter springs unbidden to mind), Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are ''the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what...