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The populist phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was a symbol both predated his candidacy and achieved independent fulfillment in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Brazil. At the center of the populist challenge, this volume proposes, are two questions. The first revolves around the question of sovereignty: who governs a country? This question is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives and has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has come to be called the administrative state has intruded more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies. The second key question, one related to the issue of sovereignty, concerns what Lincoln called "public sentiment": the widespread, almost taken-for-granted yet nonetheless palpable affirmation by a people of their national identity. The erosion of national sovereignty to which populism is a response has been accompanied by an erosion of that shared national consensus. Increasingly, the traditional pillars of this consensus-the binding forces of family, religion, civic duty, and patriotic filiation-have faltered before the blandishments of transnational progressivism.The debate sparked by these problems has turned on a number of high-profile issues which this volume seeks to address, including immigration, free trade, foreign policy, religious freedom, and the question of citizenship.

Conrad Black, bestselling author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and Flight of the Eagle: America's Rise from Colonial Upstart to the World's Superpower, turns his attention to his friend President Donald J. Trump and provides the most intriguing and significant, but certainly not uncritical, analysis yet of Trump's political rise. Ambitious in intellectual scope, contrarian in many of its opinions, and admirably concise, this is surely set to be one of the most provocative political books you are likely to read this year.

"The election of Donald Trump in 2016 didn't just shock the country, it rattled the Republican Party and forced an overdue reckoning between rank-and-file Republicans and party leadership. Stung by his ascendancy as Republican voters rejected one establishment candidate after another during the presidential primaries, conservative leaders banded together to form what is known as "NeverTrump." This cabal of self-proclaimed conservatives included prominent lawmakers; top conservative publications, their editors and writers; and Republican donors and activists. After failing to defeat Trump in November 2016, NeverTrump became part of #TheResistance, primarily organized by the Left, to sabotage Trump's presidency. The very same people who had used the Republican Party as their vehicle for power, fame, and influence were actively working to destroy the party's leader and punish Trump-supporting Republicans in Washington. At the same time, they became what they professed to despise about Donald Trump: petty, vengeful, bombastic, reactionary, and impulsive. And it's unlikely that marquee names long associated with conservatism and the Republican Party will hold a place of influence in the GOP again"--

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders' Constitution, as amended, and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their "living Constitution," a term that implies the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or "transformation" (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy, made possible by man's increasingly god-like control of his own moral evolution.Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. It takes controversial stands on matters political and scholarly, describing the political genius of America's founders and their efforts to shape future generations through a constitutional culture that included immigration, citizenship, and educational policies. Then it turns to the attempted progressive refounding of America, tracing its accelerating radicalism from the New Deal to the 1960s' New Left to today's unhappy campus nihilists. Finally, the volume appraises American conservatives' efforts, so far unavailing despite many famous victories, to restore the founders' Constitution and moral common sense. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what have conservatives learned and where should we go from here?Along the way, Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, argues with critics on the left and right, and refutes fashionable doctrines including relativism, multiculturalism, and neoconservatism, providing in effect a one-volume guide to the increasingly influential Claremont school of conservative thought by one of its most engaged thinkers.

This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World--- about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life's blood of the country. God and Mamon shows how the dynamics of money in its many dimensions (m

The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, Ned Balbo's sixth book of poems, inhabits that twilight, "the hour of dark and not-dark," when the rising of the moon traces the arc of memory, and we ask ourselves, "What else are we given?" From a crow's orbit and a hawk's descent to desire, love, and heartbreak, these poems range widely in their search for the sacred, whether visible to the eye or buried, waiting to be discovered, like all that "the dark still holds." The trove unearthed includes a sister lost to the author by adoption, speaking from a parallel life that could have been his own; an abandoned daughter who, in an earlier decade, dreams of distant Pluto; and the compass that once belonged to the poet's birth father, the mute artifact of lost connections. A conspiracy theorist casts doubt on the moon landing; Saint Joseph grieves at the loss of his son to the suffering God has planned; and a figure in Bosch's triptych, despite an afterlife of torment, fondly recalls the earthly delights he savored.Through brief lyrics and longer narratives in a variety of forms, we see that time is "unforgiving/yet not merciless," and that even when we draw back-like the touch-me-not plants whose leaves withdraw "like seawater parted by the wind"-our need to touch and to be touched is universal.

In April of 2002, a mosque in Cambridge, MA run by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) posted an appeal on its website: "Chechen refugee family needs temporary place to live until they complete their permanent refugee status in the US. Husband has good business knowledge, auto-mechanic experience and construction." Contrary to the Islamic Society of Boston's claims, taken entirely at face value by most media, that the Tsarnaev brothers only briefly and occasionally attended its Cambridge mosque over the year or so before they bombed the Boston Marathon, the Tsarnaevs were already involved with the ISB in April of 2002 - the month that they arrived in the United States. The family, which was not religious when it arrived in America, began regularly praying at the ISB mosque and turned increasingly fundamentalist. This fits an alarming pattern: Since 9/11, fourteen leaders and members of the ISB have either been imprisoned, killed by law enforcement, or declared fugitives for their involvement in Islamic terrorism. The stories of the Tsarnaev brothers have been told in countless places. The story of the mosque that they attended during their increasing radicalization - and the organization that runs it - has not been told in any meaningful way yet. Terror in the Cradle of Liberty documents the rise of Islamist networks within New England's historically-moderate and century-old Muslim community since the 1960s. It contains a detailed and personal account of the efforts by Massachusetts activists since 2002 to expose and counter the influence of Islamist networks in New England - even as Jewish, political, and law enforcement leaders in the Bay State have decided to embrace these networks as interfaith and community allies.

The virtue of prudence suffuses the writings of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, yet the demands of statecraft compelled both to take daring positions against long odds: Burke against the seemingly inexorable march of the French Revolution, Lincoln against disunion at a moment when the Northern situation appeared untenable. Placing their statesmanship and writings in relief helps to illuminate prudence in its full dimensions: inflected with caution but not confined to it, bound to circumstance, and finding expression in the particular but grounded in the absolute. This comparative study of two thinkers and statesmen who described themselves as "Old Whigs" argues for a recovery of prudence as the political virtue par excellence by viewing it through the eyes, words, and deeds of two of its foremost exemplars. Both statesmen who were deeply informed by the life of the mind, Burke and Lincoln illustrate prudence in its universal but also contrasting dimensions. Burke emphasized the primacy of feeling, Lincoln the axioms of logic. Burke saw British prudence emanating from the mists of ancient history; for Lincoln, America's soul lay in a discrete moment of founding in 1776. Yet both were moved by a respect for the mysterious and customary. Each maintained the virtue of compromise while adhering to immovable commitments. At a time when American politics, and American conservatism in particular, teems with a desire for boldness but also an innate resistance to schemes of social or political transformation, this book answers with a fuller and richer account of prudence as it emerges in the thought and action of two of the greatest statesmen and thinkers of modern times.

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most important general medical journals in the world. Doctors rely on the conclusions it publishes, and most do not have the time to look beyond abstracts to examine methodology or question assumptions. Many of its pronouncements are conveyed by the media to a mass audience, which is likely to take them as authoritative. But is this trust entirely warranted?Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor retired from practice, turned a critical eye upon a full year of the Journal, alert to dubious premises and to what is left unsaid. In False Positive, he demonstrates that many of the papers it publishes reach conclusions that are not only flawed, but obviously flawed. He exposes errors of reasoning and conspicuous omissions apparently undetected by the editors. In some cases, there is reason to suspect actual corruption.When the Journal takes on social questions, its perspective is solidly politically correct. Practically no debate on social issues appears in the printed version, and highly debatable points of view go unchallenged. The Journal reads as if there were only one possible point of view, though the American medical profession (to say nothing of the extensive foreign readership) cannot possibly be in total agreement with the stances taken in its pages. It is thus more megaphone than sounding board. There is indeed much in the New England Journal of Medicine that deserves praise and admiration. But this book should encourage the general reader to take a constructively critical view of medical news and to be wary of the latest medical doctrines.

Collapse takes stock of a volatile and threatening international environment by looking at some of the underlying causes and flashpoints-the principal one being the failure of institutions and elites to respond to their constituencies and address the problems of our age. This is a problem spanning the increased polarization that bred nationalist and populist movements, the continued failure of Western leaders to come up with effective strategies for combating authoritarian rivals like Russia and China, and the ongoing Islamist threat. Schoen makes clear that the indispensable ingredient for any constructive path forward is effective, engaged, and committed American leadership. This is discussed through the lens of the failed models of President Trump's two recent predecessors, which reflected, respectively, an uncritical embrace of American power-lacking strategic insight and proportion-and an uncritical abandonment of American leadership that suggested an abject view of the U.S. moral example in the world. Instead, Schoen posits assertive democratic idealism-an embrace of U.S. moral leadership around the world but in ways that remain leavened by realism and a guiding understanding of our national interest. Whether President Trump can deliver on such a vision remains to be seen.

Social media giants are poisoning our journalism, our politics, our relationships and ultimately our minds. Glenn Reynolds looks at the up and downsides of social media and at proposals for regulation, and offers his own fix that respects free speech while reducing social media's toll.

Contemporary American society, with its emphasis on mobility and economic progress, all too often loses sight of the importance of a sense of "place" and community. Appreciating place is essential for building the strong local communities that cultivate civic engagement, public leadership, and many of the other goods that contribute to a flourishing human life.Do we, in losing our places, lose the crucial basis for healthy and resilient individual identity, and for the cultivation of public virtues? For one can't be a citizen without being a citizen of some place in particular; one isn't a citizen of a motel. And if these dangers are real and present ones, are there ways that intelligent public policy can begin to address them constructively, by means of reasonable and democratic innovations that are likely to attract wide public support?Why Place Matters takes these concerns seriously, and its contributors seek to discover how, given the American people as they are, and American economic and social life as it now exists--and not as those things can be imagined to be in some utopian scheme--we can find means of fostering a richer and more sustaining way of life. The book is an anthology of essays exploring the contemporary problems of place and placelessness in American society.The book includes contributions from distinguished scholars and writers such as poet Dana Gioia (former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, urbanist Witold Rybczynski, architect Philip Bess, essayists Christine Rosen and Ari Schulman, philosopher Roger Scruton, transportation planner Gary Toth, and historians Russell Jacoby and Joseph Amato.

The Necessity of Sculpture brings together a selection of articles on sculpture and sculptors from Eric Gibson's nearly four-decade career as an art critic. It covers subjects as diverse as Mesopotamian cylinder seals, war memorials, and the art of the American West; stylistic periods such as the Hellenistic in Ancient Greece and Kamakura in medieval Japan; Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other historical figures; modernists like Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti; and contemporary artists including Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, and Jeff Koons. Organized chronologically by artist and period, this collection is as much a synoptic history of sculpture as it is an art chronicle. At the same time, it is an illuminating introduction to the subject for anyone coming to it for the first time.

Prosecutors can "indict a ham sandwich," we hear, and laugh at the absurdity. Yet the joke captures a truth: federal prosecutors wield enormous power over us all. And the federal criminal justice system is so stacked in favor of the government that shocking numbers of innocent people have been sent to prison. In Conviction Machine, two leading authorities combine their knowledge and experience to describe the problems within the Department of Justice and in the federal courts-and to offer solutions. Both have already published books exposing flaws and abuses in the system. Harvey A. Silverglate, a prominent criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer, showed that every one of us is vulnerable to criminal prosecution in Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor in three districts under nine United States attorneys from both political parties and lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals, witnessed appalling abuses by prosecutors that prompted her to write Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.Together, Powell and Silverglate shine a light on the defects of the system: overzealous prosecutors, perjury traps, negligent judges, perverse limits on self-defense, vague and overabundant criminal statutes, insufficient requirements for criminal intent, and no accountability for prosecutors. Most important, they provide a much-needed blueprint for reforming the Department of Justice and the criminal justice system, including actions an average citizen can take to help restore justice.

On October 11, 2018, Encounter Books celebrated its twentieth anniversary at an evening gala honoring Rebekah Mercer and Sir Roger Scruton at the Andrew Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C. Rebekah Mercer, who was introduced by the historian Victor Davis Hanson, was the recipient of the inaugural Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals, which honors an individual who fosters the intellectual and moral resources that nurture ordered liberty and the pursuit of truth in American cultural and political life. What follows is adapted from the remarks delivered that night.

Americans have never been more divided, and we're ripe for a breakup. The bitterness, the gridlock, the growing tolerance of violence, invite us to think that we'd be happier were we two different countries. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of law, we are already two nations. There's a second reason why secession beckon

American health care is at a crossroads. Health spending reached $3.5 trillion in 2017. Yet more than 27 million people remain uninsured. And it's unclear if all that spending is buying higher-quality care. Patients, doctors, insurers, and the government acknowledge that the healthcare status quo is unsustainable. America's last attempt at

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written-the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan "experts," an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court-the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language-he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas's biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America's future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

The election of 2016 prompted journalists and political scientists to write obituaries for the Republican Party-or prophecies of a new dominance. But it was all rather familiar. Whenever one of our two great parties has a setback, we've heard: "This is the end of the Democratic Party," or, "The Republican Party is going out of existence." Yet both survive, and thrive.We have the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world-the Democratic Party founded in 1832 to reelect Andrew Jackson, the Republican Party founded in 1854 to oppose slavery in the territories. They are older than almost every American business, most American colleges, and many American churches. Both have seemed to face extinction in the past, and have rebounded to be competitive again. How have they managed it?Michael Barone, longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, brings a deep understanding of our electoral history to the question and finds a compelling answer. He illuminates how both parties have adapted, swiftly or haltingly, to shifting opinion and emerging issues, to economic change and cultural currents, to demographic flux. At the same time, each has maintained a constant character. The Republican Party appeals to "typical Americans" as understood at a given time, and the Democratic Party represents a coalition of "out-groups." They are the yin and yang of American political life, together providing vehicles for expressing most citizens' views in a nation that has always been culturally, religiously, economically, and ethnically diverse.The election that put Donald Trump in the White House may have appeared to signal a dramatic realignment, but in fact it involved less change in political allegiances than many before, and it does not portend doom for either party. How America's Political Parties Change (and How They Don't) astutely explains why these two oft-scorned institutions have been so resilient.

This project of restoration includes an examination of the absurdity of the attacks on common sense. It also turns to well-known stories drawn from the Western literary tradition to help readers again find their footing in the world of common sense.

What would happen if the maniacal tyranny in Pyongyang took over the vibrant democracy of South Korea? Today, there is a real possibility that the destitute North Korean regime will soon dominate its thriving southern neighbor, with help from the government in Seoul itself.More than any South Korean president before him, Moon Jae-in is intent on achieving Korean union, even if it's done on Pyongyang's terms. To that end, he has been making South Korea compatible with the totalitarian North, and distinctly less free. He is also removing defenses to infiltration and invasion and taking steps to end his country's only real guarantee of security, the alliance with the United States. If Moon's policy results in handing Kim Jong Un a "final victory" and South Korea falls to despotism, America will lose the anchor of its western defense perimeter, and the free world will be at risk.

Vexing social issues such as the opioid epidemic, criminal violence, and chronic unemployment are the target of social programs Americans fund with their tax dollars. Husock argues that over the past century, the U.S. has lost sight of the more powerful antidote to these problems: positive social norms.

Longtime analyst Gertz explains how America's elites disastrously underestimated China for decades. Now, China is moving quickly with its ambitions to advance its brand of totalitarianism around the world and is working to replace free, open and democratic societies.