Free Republic

The Statue of Liberty used to be the face America projected to the world. A gift from the people of France in 1886 and an emblem of how Americans saw themselves and how they wanted to be seen by the world. Liberte eclairant le monde is the name given the statue—”Liberty enlightening the world.” The female face adorning the Statue of Liberty expresses an otherworldly classical beauty and the vigilance necessary lest liberty succumb to licentiousness. Her uplifted torch symbolizes purification through illumination. Every year Hollywood has a newer face America projects to the world, a symbol of material...

You have to hand it to John McCain — his campaign ads are (inadvertently) the most incisive commentary on the death of Jeffersonian democracy ever broadcast. Superficially, they lambaste Barack Obama's worshipful crowds and messianic promises that a heavenly "light will shine down" on his candidacy. But what the ads really lampoon is what Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls Presidentialism: our paternalistic view that presidents are godlike saviors — and therefore democracy's only important figures. "The once-every-four-years hope for the lever pull sensation of democratic power blinds people to the opportunities for democratic representation, deliberation, activism and change that surrounds...

In the years following the Second World War, a group of writers emerged who became known as America’s “New Conservatives,” prominently including Richard M. Weaver, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. In this case, “new” did not merely indicate a generational transition; these thinkers did not represent a simple return to the conservatism of the 1930s following the emergency of world war. Instead, the New Conservatives articulated ideas and concepts that were unprecedented in American intellectual history. They took their political bearings from a quite novel set of intellectual authorities. Most striking of all, at the very moment of...

Peter Foley/European Pressphoto AgencyBernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library on Wednesday. "This entire book was written in the grip of a kind of religious terror," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his introduction to "Democracy in America." It is difficult to believe. Religious terror? Tocqueville, an aristocratic French lawyer, wrote his classic text after a nine-month visit to the United States in 1831. And far from being saturated with terror, it is a refined, detached series of reflections on the effects of American democracy on character, commerce, culture and belief: why the arts in America are more concerned...