If 2008 was all about hope and change, 2012 may well be about ladders. Yes, ladders. President Barack Obama has developed a soft-spot for the “ladder of opportunity” metaphor, and he’s running with it. At a community college in Ohio a few weeks ago, he promised an economy “where there are ladders of opportunity.” At a campaign event in Chicago this January, he called on those who’ve made it to “do a little bit more so that the next generation is able to get on the ladder of success.” In …
Poor George Washington. His birthday, spontaneously celebrated since the Revolution and formally declared a holiday in 1879, has slowly morphed into the insipid Presidents Day you’ll hear about today. George Washington, the “indispensable man” of the Revolution who was rightly extolled for being “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” has now been lumped together with the likes of James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Franklin Pierce and John Tyler. It gets worse. Washington’s good name and great legacy are now shamelessly invoked to justify …
Let’s be honest: We all know you’re not really gonna quit smoking, start exercising, and eat more vegetables as of today. As Emerson wryly remarked: “All promise outruns performance.” The key to keeping your New Year’s resolutions is to make them more realistic. Rather than try to drastically change the way you live, why not start with the more modest goal of changing the way you speak? And what better place to start for conservatives than with America’s Founding principles? As conservatives continue to rediscover the Declaration of Independence and …
All this time, we thought conservatives were the ones pining for the past. Turns out we didn’t look back far enough in time. The stone age, when sex came easy and all were equal, may just have been the halcyon era of liberalism. Intelligent Life magazine, an offshoot of The Economist, asked a panel of writers “what was the best time and place to be alive?” Lucy Kellaway, an associate editor at the Financial Times, answered, America 10,000 to 20,000 years ago: Men and women in these hunter-gatherer tribes were …
These days, everybody loves Reagan. It’s not just the eight GOP candidates who are trying to out-Reagan each other on the campaign trail. Liberals, too—including President Obama—have developed a fondness for the Gipper (or at least their reconstituted version of Reagan). Most attempts to claim President Ronald Reagan’s mantle have focused on domestic policy. But Reagan did not only overcome malaise at home and launch the longest uninterrupted peacetime economic expansion in the 20th century. He also reinvigorated American foreign policy, strengthened the military, and won the Cold War. With …
What is America? What is this country fundamentally about? By and large, pundits and politicians on the right and the left don’t seem to get it. Some come close, but there is a widespread failure to explain why the Founders established this republic. On this date in history, two of the clearest expressions of the American ideal were first articulated. On October 27, 1787, a young Alexander Hamilton, writing under the pen name Publius, published the first Federalist paper in New York’s Independent Journal. In the very first paragraph, he …
Silly Brits. After all these years, they still don’t understand natural rights. During a moot debate last week at Franklin Hall in Philadelphia, British lawyers argued that the 1776 American Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. “There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to,” the British barristers maintained. Well, of course seceding from Great Britain and renouncing allegiance to King George III was both illegal and treasonable by British legal standards. …
Martin Luther King is rightly remembered for his dream, first articulated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 48 years ago this Sunday, that the principles embodied in “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” would one day be vindicated and applied to all men, regardless of “the color of their skin.” Fewer remember that in the ensuing years before his untimely death in 1968, King gradually abandoned the dream of equal rights and sought instead “the realization of equality” through government redistribution of wealth. How …
On the day when everyone celebrates America and the glorious document that justifies its existence, I’d like to offer three cheers for the amazing Americans who make up this great country. After all, we revere the principles of the Declaration of Independence because they give rise, when applied, to a nation of self-reliant, generous, hard-working and courageous people—a people whose passion for liberty fuels a vibrant civil society that is a true wonder to behold. In this spirit, here are five great virtues that I, a foreigner living here for …
Reading the results of the latest Pew poll on how to interpret the Constitution, I was reminded of an insightful remark by the great essayist Montaigne: “It is very easy, upon accepted foundations, to build what you please.” What really matters, in other words, is the question. Once you’ve framed the problem a certain way, the range of answers is necessarily circumscribed and it becomes much easier to nudge your audience in a particular direction. Consider the question posed by the Pew Research Center: “Should the Supreme Court base its …
