Think of the statistician’s bell curve and you have the shape of public opinion today. At one tail are antiwar partisans for whom the Gulf War is a continuation of Vietnam, while at the other tail is an equally automatic …
Half a dozen years ago Americans rediscovered the failure of their public schools. A series of governmental and foundation reports warned that the mediocrity of elementary and secondary school education endangered America’s competitiveness in the global economy. There was little …
This war is a catastrophe, all the more so for being avoidable. There was—there remains— another way to stop Saddam Hussein: the combination of sanctions and genuinely multilateral enforcement. Now the unintended and half-intended consequences are spilling out like Kuwait’s …
Social decline? Social decay? Social breakdown? We wondered which of these phrases, none of them “scientific” in nature, would best apply to the current situation in the United States. Social decline—too mild. Social decay—that suggests a process too slow. Social …
Among the economic changes wrought by the 1980s has been a new fiscal relationship between the federal government, on one hand, and the state and local governments, on the other. Ronald Reagan heralded the “New Federalism,” which was supposed to …
They seemed at first like an apt symbol: a tragic embodiment of all that needed fixing in America. Dirt poor, out of work, without a safety net, the pitiful army of the “homeless” pricked the country’s conscience. Like blacks in …
The news from the USSR is ominous. The Soviet Interior ministry has attacked institutions of representative government in Lithuania and Latvia; Estonia waits nervously. Unarmed supporters of the elected governments of these republics have been shot or crushed under tanks. …
In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe devotes a single passage to the way historical memory influences a certain kind of modern liberal sensibility. Wolfe’s Bronx assistant district attorney, Kramer, searching his political conscience, stumbles on the word “socialist” …
Democracy and Its Critics is a rigorous summary of the life work of one of America’s premier political scientists. It is also a timely antidote to the right’s equation of democracy with the “freedom” of an unrestrained capitalist market. In …
One of the great British scholars of the twentieth century, R. G. Collingwood is chiefly remembered today as the author of three books: The Idea of History, The Idea of Nature, and The Principles of Art. All are remarkable works …
New Yorkers are no strangers to crime. In 1832, returning from a particularly raucous July 4 celebration, Philip Hone complained bitterly about the decline of the city of which he had once been mayor: “Squibs [firecrackers] were thrown with a …
In announcing his resignation last fall as drug czar, William Bennett asserted that the nation had turned the corner in the war on drugs. President Bush concurred. “We’re on the road to victory,” he declared. They may be the only …
During the mid-to-late-1980s much of the American Southwest came to resemble the closing scenes of The Last Picture Show, with the prairie winds blowing dry leaves and tumbleweeds past the filmtown’s dilapidated stores and shuttered movie house. Along a fault …
It is obvious that feelings of decline are now widespread in a way that they were not in the past. Without exception, everyone that I have asked about whether America is in decline has said yes, regardless of his or …
After the smart bombs, America needs an intelligent agenda. For over a decade, Americans have heard that “big” government ruins everything. The public weal—everything save flag waving and arresting flag burners—is best left to private enterprise. Yet when the government …
