Free Republic

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11/13/00 1:15 p.m. Win One for the Founders But this is not the last battle in our endless war for freedom. By Michael Ledeen Hillary's attack against the Electoral College is a symptom of the rot that seems to have infected half of the electorate. Bill, Hillary, and Gore feel right at home — undoubtedly more at home than they do in the sane and healthy parts of America — with European socialists, the "third way" gang: English Labour, Italian ex-Communists, German Social Democrats, Scandinavian welfare statists. Appropriately enough for a group that appropriated the label of the Fascist ...

When George W. Bush, in one of the most memorable lines of his acceptance speech, said that "Times of plenty...challenge American character," he was paraphrasing Alexis de Tocqueville, the most brilliant analyst of American democracy and American character. Indeed, for Tocqueville, the pursuit of personal wealth was the fundamental challenge to our utterly unique dynamic, creative and egalitarian character, for, unless it were tempered by religious faith, and unless we were reminded to devote a significant amount of our passion and energy to advancing the common good, the madcap quest for riches threatened American liberty. Our rulers offer us a ...

Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. March 10, 2000 China Awakes — and Threatens I spent more than twenty years studying fascism, and all that time I kept asking myself how the democratic countries of the West could have been so blind, and how they could have been so totally unprepared for Hitler's war. After all, he had written Mein Kampf, which pretty much laid it all out. Once in power, he set about arming the country, making menacing sounds to his neighbors, crushing the Jews and separating them out of the population, and ...