Free Republic

If not of Trump himself I am a big fan of William Voegeli, who is not a big fan of Donald Trump. Voegeli has been published in various high-profile places, but is best known as editor of the relatively low-profile Claremont Review of Books. With all due respect to the CRB, that’s too bad, because America would be a better place if more people read Voegeli. And never more so than today, because he offers about the best explanation I’ve seen for why there’s nothing hateful, dumb or crazy about the motivation behind those supporting Trump, even though Voegeli makes...

Progressives will always claim that no matter how badly their plans go wrong, at least their terrible policies were well-intentioned.The regimes that shot orphans, starved entire cities into submission and committed genocide were “caring” in comparison to the heartless Dickensian capitalists who did nothing for the poor except create cheap products and jobs. They might have killed millions, but their red hearts were in the right place. They didn’t just spend all their time gobbling caviar and diving into swimming pools full of all money like the millionaires of the West. Instead they gave speeches about Marxism-Leninism, killed anyone who...

Killing Them With Kindness By William Voegeli Conservatives have a new reason to voice the four loveliest words in the English language: I told you so. A Stanford Law Review article by Prof. Richard Sander of UCLA concludes, "Blacks are the victims of law school programs of affirmative action, not the beneficiaries." According to Stuart Taylor, Jr.'s summary of Sander's research, preferences do such a thorough job of placing black students in law schools where they are unlikely to succeed, that abolishing affirmative action in admissions would decrease the number of blacks admitted to law schools—but increase the number...

The Implausibility of a New Liberalism By William Voegeli Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic, has written an unusually long, provocative, and important essay for that magazine. Its title, "An Argument For a New Liberalism," is at odds with its thesis, since what Beinart really wants is to revive an old liberalism. But then, its thesis is at odds with the reality of that old liberalism. Beinart wants, specifically, a revival of the liberalism of 1947, the year the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was founded. More specifically still, he wants liberalism to stand resolutely against Islamist...