Free Republic

The Intellectuals Keep Flying The New York Review of Books seeks to discredit Paul Berman. 21 October 2010 In almost half a century at the helm of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers has crafted the essential journal for America’s liberal intellectual elite. Silvers is celebrated by his distinguished writers as a scrupulous, old-fashioned editor who fusses over their every word. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash tells of receiving a transatlantic phone call from Silvers just as his family was sitting down to Christmas dinner: the editor wanted to discuss a dangling participle he had spotted in...

A radical and a neoconservative change their political stripes.America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, by Francis Fukuyama, New Haven: Yale University Press, 226 pages, $25 Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, by Paul Berman, Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 311 pages, $23.95The 20th century produced a glut of political converts, St. Pauls in search of ideological roads previously untaken. Even today, in an allegedly post-ideological age, converts are plentiful.Two recent books, Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads and Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists, describe parallel progressions. Fukuyama, once a...

George Walden reviews Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman This is the best book I have read on Muslim fundamentalism and what to do about it. Paul Berman writes in the excellent American weekly The New Republic. His self-description as a Social Democrat suggests a European approach to the Middle East, yet his intelligence, breadth of culture, honesty and courage are a world away from the moralistic grandstanding of slithy toves like Chris Patten, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer. The clarity of his thought cuts through their evasions like a knife through butter, as Berman looks the evil of...

<p>THE TUMBLING STATUE of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last Wednesday did look like something out of the revolutions of 1989, and this resemblance ought to plunge us into thought. A thousand experts have told us that, by fighting in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, America has thrown itself into the clash of civilizations, and that reality in the Muslim world bears very little in common with reality in the West. Even so, that falling statue looked exactly like one of those colossal statues of Lenin and the other Communist leaders that used to stand guard in public plazas all over Eastern Europe.</p>