George Will
George Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to Fox News. His books include One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008), Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1989), The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election (1987), and Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983). Will grew up in Champaign, Ill., attended Trinity College and Oxford University, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton.
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MASON CITY. To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” – Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946) Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his ... -
Snakes on a Plane for Emotional Support?
When next you shoehorn yourself into one of America’s ever-shrinking airline seats, you might encounter a new wrinkle in the romance of air travel. You might be amused, or not, to discover a midsize — say, seven-feet long — boa constrictor ... -
Remembering Frederick Douglass, Champion of American Individualism
It was an assertion of hard-won personal sovereignty: Frederick Douglass, born on a Maryland plantation 200 years ago this month, never knew on what February day because history-deprivation was inflicted to confirm slaves as non-persons. So, later in life, Douglass picked ... -
The Decay of Truth
It cannot be a sign of social health that the number of tweets per day worldwide exploded from 5,000 in 2007 to 500 million six years later. And this might be related, by a few degrees of separation, to the fact that whereas ... -
A New Paean to Progressivism Overlooks Why Americans Lost Trust in Government
Is there anything more depressing than a cheerful liberal? The question is prompted by one such, historian David Goldfield, who has written a large-hearted book explaining that America’s problems would yield to government’s deft ameliorating touch if Americans ... -
How Merit-Based College Admissions Became So Unfair
During World War I, chemist James Conant was deeply involved in research on what was considered the worst imaginable weapon: poison gas. During World War II, as a science adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, Conant was so central to the ... -
America Needs a Balanced-Budget Amendment More Than Ever
Today’s political discord is less durable and dangerous than a consensus, one that unites the political class more than ideology divides it. The consensus is that, year in and year out, in good times and bad, Americans should be ... -
We Don’t Need Government to Remind Us that Smoking Kills
Preaching morality while practicing cupidity can be tricky, but various American governments have done it for years regarding smoking. This mental contortion now has a new chapter. The four largest American tobacco companies (Altria, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Philip Morris) ... -
Survival of the Shrillest
“The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.” — Eric Hoffer, First Things, Last Things (1971) Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) meant that intellectuals in his day tended not to be temperate. In our day, this defect — moral overheating — has been democratized: Anyone can have it. ... -
By Endorsing Moore, Trump Sank the U.S. Presidency to Unplumbed Depths
The first time ended badly, so when, 156 years later, Alabamians were incited to again try secession, this time from the national consensus that America is a pretty nice place, they said: No. No, that is, to rubbish like this: Interviewer: “[... -
The GOP's Tax Wager Is Worth the Gamble
Washington — The Republicans’ tax legislation is built on economic projections that are as confidently as they are cheerfully made concerning the legislation’s shaping effect on the economy over the next ten years. This claim to prescience must amaze alumni ... -
In Sports Gambling Case, the Supreme Court Should Bet on Federalism
American democracy’s comic opera frequently features collaborations of “bootleggers and Baptists.” These entertainments are so named because during Prohibition, Baptists thought banning Demon Rum would improve public morals (oh, well) and bootleggers favored the ban because it made scarce ... -
Here’s to Another Year of American Hilarity
Tryptophan, an amino acid in turkey, is unjustly blamed for what mere gluttony does, making Americans comatose every fourth Thursday in November. But before nodding off, give thanks for another year of American hilarity, including: A company curried favor with ... -
Alabama Rolls toward a High-Stakes Skirmish
But for the bomb, the four would be in their 60s, probably grandmothers. Three were 14 and one was 11 in 1963 when the blast killed them in the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is four blocks from the law office of Doug ... -
The GOP Tax Bill’s Disconcerting Raid on University Endowments
Such is the federal government’s sprawl, and its power to establish new governing precedents, mere Washington twitches can jeopardize venerable principles and institutions. This is illustrated by a seemingly small but actually momentous provision of the Republicans’ tax bill — ... -
On Tax Reform, Republicans are Defining Victory Down
Needing a victory to validate their majorities, congressional Republicans have chosen not to emulate Shakespeare’s Henry V before Agincourt. He advocated stiffening the sinews, summoning up the blood, and lending the eye a terrible aspect. The Republicans would rather ... -
Navigating Trumpian Politics in the Virginia Gubernatorial Race
Arlington, Va. — The breakfasters at Bob and Edith’s Diner are too preoccupied with their tasty bacon and eggs to notice the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Or perhaps, like all Americans who are more sensitive than oysters, they are in the ... -
In Blocking Abortion Legislation, Democrats Will Display Their Extremism
What would America’s abortion policy be if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number — say, seven or eleven? This thought experiment is germane to why the abortion issue has been politically ... -
The Auto Industry Has a Glamorous Past but an Opaque Future
Detroit — Bending metal, slapping on chrome, and marketing an empowering product and status marker that mesmerized 20th-century America, the automobile industry typified the Old Economy, of which General Motors was emblematic. As was its bankruptcy. Today, GM’s CEO Mary ... -
Bikini-Clad Baristas Serve Up a Lesson in Free Speech
Seattle — Amazon, which has made this city the epicenter of a retailing revolution, is not the Northwest’s only commercial disrupter. In the nearby city of Everett, Liberty Ziska and some other bikini baristas, giving new meaning to coffee as ... -
Seattle’s Nietzschean City Council
Seattle — In this city, which is a petri dish of progressivism, a prevailing theory is that when you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it, except when they do not. Another, and related, theory is that ... -
The Steep Cost of Cheap Speech
At this shank end of a summer that a calmer America someday will remember with embarrassment, you must remember this: In the population of 325 million, a small sliver crouches on the wilder shores of politics, another sliver lives in the ... -
The Burdens of Progressivism: A New Novel
Life is exhausting — and daily choices are unbearably burdensome — for some Americans who are so comfortably situated that they have the time and means to make themselves morally uncomfortable. They think constantly about what they believe are the global ripples, ... -
What Kind of War Is Trump Threatening with North Korea?
The U.S. Air Force “sniffer plane” was collecting air samples off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on September 3, 1949, when it gathered evidence of radioactivity, confirming that the war-shattered Soviet Union had tested a nuclear device. The Soviets’ August 29, 1949, test had ... -
Yale Offers a Tutorial in Higher-Education Indoctrination
Summer brings no respite for academics committed to campus purifications, particularly at the institution that is the leader in the silliness sweepstakes, Yale. Its Committee on Art in Public Spaces has discovered that a stone carving that has adorned an ... -
The Next Obamacare Mess and the Rule of Law
When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’s Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. ... -
Diminished Trust in Government Can Be Traced to the Vietnam War
One day [Marine Theodore Wallace] saw an officer casually aim his rifle and try to shoot a Vietnamese boy in the distance. “Sir, what are you doing?” he’d asked. “He’s probably supplying the [North Vietnamese Army],” the officer ... -
Congress’s Continuing Self-Degradation
In January 1988, in Ronald Reagan’s final State of the Union address, he noisily dropped on a table next to the podium in the House chamber three recent continuing resolutions, each more than a thousand pages long. Each was evidence ... -
The Air Force Faces the Future
Montgomery, Ala. It is said that America’s armed forces have been stressed by 16 years of constant warfare, the longest such period in the nation’s history. For the Air Force, however, the high tempo of combat operations began 26 years ... -
Fixing the ‘Rotting Carcass’ Tax Code
Cynics are said to be people who are prematurely disappointed about the future. Such dyspepsia is encouraged by watching Republicans struggle to move on from the dog’s breakfast they have made of health-care reform to the mare’s nest ... -
What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?
The Bronx, the only one of New York City’s five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, “the city ... -
‘Repeal and Replace’? Try ‘Tweak and Move On’
Two Junes ago, when the Supreme Court upheld, 6–3, a challenged provision of the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, vented: “Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors. . . . Congress passed much of the ... -
Let Us Plunge toward Our Fast-Unfolding Future
In 1859, when Manhattan still had many farms, near the Battery on the island’s southern tip the Great American Tea Company was launched. It grew, and outgrew its name, becoming in 1870 the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which in 1912 begat ... -
Hope in Sing Sing Prison
Ossining, N.Y. — Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison’s razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty. Almost. Rain or shine, however, a ... -
Engineering without a License
Beginning this week, Washington hopes that infrastructure, which is a product of civil engineering, will be much discussed. But if you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license. ... -
Buckley Captained Conservatism Before It Was Hijacked
In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley’s high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies. Liberalism, Trilling declared, was “not only ... -
A Portentous Election in the Peach State
Atlanta — By the time Georgia’s sixth district votes in the special congressional election on June 20, $40 million — perhaps more than $130 per ballot — will have been spent to pick one-435th of one-half of one of the three branches of one ... -
‘Baumol’s Disease’ Explains Flagging Productivity
Although William J. Baumol, who recently died at 95, was not widely known beyond the ranks of economists, all Americans are living with, and policymakers are struggling with, “Baumol’s disease.” It is one reason brisk economic growth is becoming more ... -
Trumpian Signaling on Sanctuary Cities
“But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ‘twas a famous victory.” – Robert Southey “The Battle of Blenheim” (1798) Southey, a pacifist, wrote his anti-war poem long after the 1704 battle ... -
Trump Does Not Know What It Is to Know
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of ... -
Will France Elect a Gallic Barack Obama?
The French are too intellectually vain to borrow others’ political ideas, but too interested in style not to appreciate and appropriate that of others. So, on May 7 they might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama, a ... -
The Battle against Sex Trafficking of Minors
Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 miles per hour long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the ... -
What the Freedom Caucus Stands For
With a mellifluous name suggesting bucolic tranquility, Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, is an unlikely object of the caterwauling recently directed at him and the House Freedom Caucus he leads. The vituperation was occasioned by the HFC’s ... -
Our National Scourge of Misinformation
Impulse control is unfashionable as well as unpresidential, but perhaps you should resist the urge to trip people who stride briskly down the sidewalk fixated on their phone screens, absorbed in texting and feeling entitled to expect others to make ... -
End the Filibuster’s Power of Obstruction
The Senate’s coming confirmation of Neil Gorsuch will improve the Supreme Court, and Democrats’ incontinent opposition to him will inadvertently improve the Senate — if Republicans are provoked to thoroughly reform the filibuster. If eight Democrats will not join the 52 ... -
Whatever Replaces Obamacare Will Look a Lot Like Obamacare
‘Mend it, don’t end it” was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) look increasingly like “mend it, don’t end it.” The problem is not that, ... -
What’s the ‘Public Purpose’ of the National Endowment for the Arts?
Although the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2016 cost of $148 million was less than one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget, attempting to abolish the NEA is a fight worth having, never mind the certain futility of the fight. Let’... -
Eugenics Was a Progressive Cause
The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray’s appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced “eugenics,” thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics — controlled breeding to ... -
Trump’s Budget Chief Tackles a Rubik’s Cube of a Federal Budget
The dyspeptic Henry Adams was not nice but not wrong when he described what now is named the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), adjacent to the White House, as an “architectural infant asylum.” The granite pile, which once housed the ... -
America’s Predictable Pension Crisis
Some American disasters come as bolts from the blue — the stock-market crash of October 1929, Pearl Harbor, the designated hitter, 9/11. Others are predictable because they arise from arithmetic that is neither hidden nor arcane. Now comes the tsunami of pension problems ...
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Play Ball, with Informed Intelligence
Even if, inexplicably, you occasionally think about things other than major league baseball, consider this: Why are many premier free agents, particularly sluggers and starting pitchers, unsigned even while we are hearing the loveliest four words, “Pitchers and catchers report”? ... -
All Economic News Is Bad News
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes was worried, but not about the unpleasantness that had begun the previous year and would linger long enough to become known as the Great Depression. What troubled the British economist was that humanity “is solving its ... -
The Perils of Protectionism
Like Horatius at the bridge, or the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled, or the Dutch boy who saved the city by putting his finger in the dike — pick your analogous heroism — the ... -
Choosing Immigration Criteria Is a Sisyphean Task
In 1790, the finest mind in the First Congress, and of his generation, addressed in the House of Representatives the immigration issue: “It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy ... -
In Oregon, Progressivism Spills Over at the Pump
Frank Lloyd Wright purportedly said, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Today, however, Oregon is the state with the strangest state of mind, which has something to do with its being ... -
Charlie Dent's Departure Makes Allentown Vulnerable to Democrats
Washington — It is almost a law of our political physics: Those who choose to leave Congress thereby demonstrate qualities that make one wish they would linger here longer. After seven terms in the House of Representatives, which followed eight years ... -
When Judicial Deference Becomes Dereliction of Duty
Wisconsin’s supreme court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee’s Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness. On ... -
Public Workers Could Stand to Benefit from Janus v. AFSCME
Seattle — It is protected by Washington state’s lopsidedly Democratic political class, which knows who butters its bread. It has been provided with bespoke law, tailored for its comfort. Nevertheless, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been so avaricious ... -
Whirlpool Has Trapped Washington in a Spin Cycle
A household appliance will be the next stepping stone on America’s path to restored greatness. The government is poised to punish many Americans, in the name of protecting a few of them, because, in the government’s opinion, too ... -
Is Trump Heading Toward Nuclear War with North Korea?
The first use of nuclear weapons occurred August 6, 1945. The second occurred three days later. That there has not been a third is testimony to the skill and sobriety of twelve presidents and many other people, here and abroad. Today, however, ... -
Baking a Cake Is Not Constitutionally Protected Speech
The conversation about a cake lasted less than a minute but will long reverberate in constitutional law. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear 60 minutes of speech about when, if at all, making a cake counts as constitutionally ... -
College Basketball Season Begins Under a Cloud of Scandal
Although it is plausible to suspect this, it is not true that the Credit Mobilier scandal of the late 1860s–early 1870s (financial shenanigans by politicians and others surrounding construction of the Union Pacific Railroad) and the 1920s Teapot Dome ... -
In Illinois, an Election Battle Looms over the Bankrupting 'Blue Model'
Not without thy wondrous story, Illinois, Illinois, Can be writ the nation’s glory, Illinois, Illinois. – official state song SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — This state’s story, which lately has been depressing, soon will acquire a riveting new chapter. In 2018 Illinois will ... -
Repeal and Replace the Tax Code
The Republicans’ tax bill would somewhat improve the existing revenue system that once caused Mitch Daniels (former head of the Office of Management and Budget, former Indiana governor) to say: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tax code ... -
Ron Chernow's Grant Offers a Measured Judgment of the Past
Evidence of national discernment, although never abundant, can now be found high on the New York Times combined print and e-book best-seller list. There sits Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses Simpson Grant, which no reader will wish were shorter ... -
The Radiating Mischief of Protectionism
Washington — What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ourselves into believing that corporate welfare can be seemly. Consider the caper, both amusing and depressing, that began when mighty Boeing sought protection behind the skirts of ... -
Kevin Hassett Is Betting That Corporate-Tax Cuts Will Deliver Growth
Kevin Hassett evidently has not received the memo that economics is “the dismal science.” The ebullient chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers is relishing the intellectual feast of applying to policymaking the predictive tools of a science ... -
The Chaos Grows
With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trump’s adolescent bidding with last ... -
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan: One of America's Most Successful Politicians
With biblical succinctness, and foreshadowing a resurrection, Mike Duggan said, “Let there be light!” and 65,000 LED streetlights replaced the 40 percent of the city’s streetlights that were broken when he took office in 2014. They are among the many reasons that ... -
The Supreme Court’s ‘Partisan Gerrymandering’ Case
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments tempting it to plunge into an impenetrable political thicket. It will consider a lower court’s ruling that, if allowed to stand, will require the judiciary to determine whether and when partisanship ... -
America’s Engine Is Being Slowed by Complacency
It was an epoch-defining decision to place in Westminster Abbey, among statues of monarchs, priests, and poets, a large one of James Watt, inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine. The statue’s inscription says Watt ranks among the world’s ... -
Remembering Vietnam
Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect ... -
The Future of Congressional Supremacy
’Congress has been dropping in relative power along a descending curve of 60 years’ duration, with the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. . . . The fall of the American Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical transformation toward political ... -
As Brain Injuries Increase, National Enthusiasm for Football Fades
Autumn, which is bearing down upon us like a menacing linebacker, is, as John Keats said, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Actually, Keats, a romantic, did not mention that last part. He died ... -
Trump, the Novice Protectionist
Sooner or later, and the later the better, the president’s wandering attention will flit, however briefly, to the subject of trade. So, let us try to think about the problem as he seems to: Wily cosmopolitans beyond our borders ... -
Who Will Win the GOP Senate Primary Race in Alabama?
Birmingham, Ala. — Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff ... -
When a Diminishing President Is a Good Thing
Looking, as prudent people are disinclined to do, on the bright side, there are a few vagrant reasons for cheerfulness, beginning with this: Summer love is sprouting like dandelions. To the list of history’s sublime romances — Abelard and Heloise, ... -
The Wild Blue Yonder Ain’t What It Used to Be
Montgomery, Ala. — The aircraft arrayed around the spacious lawn of Maxwell Air Force Base, home of the Air University, mostly represent long-retired types. The largest, however, is a glistening B-52 bomber, which represents a still-employed component of the Air Force’... -
Don’t Hold Your Breath for Congress to Take Back Its Warmaking Powers
Predictably and sensibly, a three-judge panel of the nation’s second-most important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, recently dismissed, unanimously, a lawsuit brought by a Yemeni man, two of whose relatives were collateral ... -
Why Senator Toomey’s Medicaid Measure Must Be Preserved
Were it not for the provision that Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania Republican, put into the Senate’s proposed health-care reform, this legislation would be moderately important but hardly momentous. Toomey’s provision, however, makes it this century’s most significant ... -
The Scars of Our Nation’s Violent Birth
Philadelphia — Some American history museums belabor visitors with this message: You shall know the truth and it shall make you feel ashamed of, but oh-so-superior to, your wretched ancestors. The new Museum of the American Revolution is better than that. ... -
Baseball’s Pace of Play Needs Some Juice
Omaha, Neb. — From Little League on up, players emulate major leaguers, so Major League Baseball’s pace-of-play problem is trickling down. Four innings into a recent College World Series game here, just seven hits and three runs had consumed 96 minutes. ... -
Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act
“You really ought to give Iowa a try. Provided you are contrary.” – “Iowa Stubborn,” from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man ‘Contrary” does not quite capture Steve King’s astringency. The Iowa native and conservative congressman was born, appropriately, in ... -
Fixing America’s Endless Infrastructure Mess
Sensing that his Scottish enemies had blundered at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell said, “The Lord hath delivered them into our hands.” Philip K. Howard, were he the exulting type, could rejoice that some of his adversaries have ... -
The Immortal Pleading for Public Broadcasting
As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts. One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society’s articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The ... -
How to Restore American Self-Reliance
When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York’s scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in ... -
Federal Power Spins Its Ever-Growing Web
A blind spider creeping through America’s judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two ... -
Today’s Left Would Have Called Elvis’s Music ‘Cultural Appropriation’
In July 1954, a 19-year-old Memphis truck driver recorded at Sun Studio the song “That’s All Right.” When a local disc jockey promised to play it, the truck driver tuned his parents’ radio to the station and went to a ... -
Who Wants to Be a Billionaire (in 1916)?
Having bestowed the presidency on a candidate who described their country as a “hellhole” besieged by multitudes trying to get into it, Americans need an antidote for social hypochondria. Fortunately, one has arrived from Don Boudreaux, an economist at George ... -
Alas, the Mortgage-Interest Deduction Cannot Be Pried Away
Attempting comprehensive tax reform is like trying to tug many bones from the clamped jaws of many mastiffs. Every provision of the code — now approaching 4 million words — was put there to placate a clamorous faction, or to create a grateful ... -
The ‘Oh, Never Mind’ President
In his first annual message to Congress, John Quincy Adams, among the most experienced and intellectually formidable presidents, warned leaders against giving the impression that “we are palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this regard, if in no ... -
Do Safer Playgrounds ‘Advance Religion’?
When not furrowing their collective brows about crèches and displays of the Ten Commandments here and there, courts often are pondering tangential contacts between the government and religious schools. Courts have held that public money can constitutionally fund the ... -
Experience America at the Time of the Great War
“War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.” – ... -
Baseball Numbers Aren’t Difficult — but This Quiz Might Be
Sportswriter: “You hit only two home runs all last year and already you’ve hit seven this year [1969]. What’s the difference?” Reds outfielder Alex Johnson: “Five.” See? Baseball numbers aren’t difficult. But be precise: As players say after ... -
An Oasis of liberty in the Arizona Sun
Phoenix — As a boy, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of the former senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee, would step out of his father’s house and shoot at tin cans 50 yards away. Now 78, he says he could fire in ... -
Questions for Judge Gorsuch
This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Neil Gorsuch about the judiciary’s role. Herewith some pertinent questions: – Lincoln’s greatness began with his recoil from the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which empowered residents of those territories to decide whether to ... -
Arizona State Leavens Academia with Intellectual Diversity
TEMPE, Ariz. — Encouraging developments are as welcome as they are rare in colleges and universities that cultivate diversity in everything but thought. Fortunately, state legislatures, alumni, and philanthropists are planting little academic platoons that will make campuses less intellectually monochrome. ... -
Slouching into Dystopia
Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis’... -
‘Big Government’ Is Ever Growing, on the Sly
In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (... -
An Adult Voice amid Pandemic Childishness
In his 72 years, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was raised in segregated Richmond, Virginia, acknowledges that he has seen much change, often for the better, including advances in ...