This is an excellent book, doubly excellent in that the writer, George Hawley, has written a book both even-handed and superbly accurate in detail about a difficult and controversial topic. I am personally deeply familiar with nearly all the facts covered in this book, and Hawley has not fallen into any significant error. Moreover, his| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I stay away from the shouters, such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Sure, they’re right in their conclusions, most of the time, but the lack of nuanced thought annoys me. There are plenty of ways to get easily worked up today, without seeking out more that don’t offer a corresponding benefit. Angelo Codevilla is| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
As the cliché goes, history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Thirty-five years ago the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed overnight, something that nobody in the West had foreseen. It turned out, contrary to the firm conclusion of all our vaunted intelligence apparatuses, that every one of those regimes was a paper tiger.| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Cass Sunstein has gathered an ensemble cast of today’s intellectual Davoisie to tell us, in seventeen separate essays, whether Trump is the harbinger of American structural doom, and if so, how. It is illuminating to read this book immediately after having read Glenn Reynolds’s The Judiciary’s Class War, with its distinction between the ruling Front-Row| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
Since I am an apocalypse monger, but a practical one, I do not worry about alien invasions or the reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, but I do worry about pandemics. This book, Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider, is a recent offering in the pandemic literature that has become popular in the past twenty years. It focuses| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The wicked reality of Communism has, over the past twenty-five years, been deliberately erased from Western education and, more broadly, from the Western mind. This was entirely predictable. The reasons behind the erasure are not complex. The ruling classes and social tastemakers in the West at the time that Communism fell, and for decades before| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I continue to be fascinated by the Bolshevik Revolution, because in its success there are many lessons. Unbiased history and biography of the Bolsheviks is a relatively recent phenomenon; prior to 1991, a combination of lack of primary materials and philo-Communism among Western historians meant very few objective books were published. Since 1991, though, the| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
I am currently very focused on the ascent to power of Communism in Russia, not because it had anything to recommend it, but for the lessons it can teach us. Some of those lessons are ones the author of this book, Sean McMeekin, wants to impart—the dangers of left-wing ideology, primarily. Those are valuable lessons,| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
This book was once famous, but was mostly forgotten when Communism died and so-called liberal democracy seemed ascendant. It is increasingly famous again, and relevant, in these days of a new creeping totalitarianism, this time in the West itself. Such timelessness is the signature of a classic work, so my goal today is to explicate| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
The great social argument of this instant is whether everyone should now, because of the Wuhan Plague, be required to wear face masks, and if so, under what circumstances. Today, therefore, I will offer a complete analysis of mask wearing, something I have seen nowhere else. True, I normally disdain writing about transitory matters, which| The Worthy House • Towards A Politics of Future Past -
