Am. History & Culture
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Speak Memory
"What the American public always wants is tragedy with a happy ending." William Dean Howells David Blight, Yale Professor of history and American Civil War scholar, in his lecture about Civil War Legacies talks about the 1900 Blue-Grey reunion in Atlanta: Every Confederate veterans' organization had its textbook committee, and many Union veterans' posts and
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Obama @ Notre Dame II
Ivan Kenneally @ Postmodern Conservative: As I argue in my essay, America is particularly emblematic both of modernity’s debts to Christianity and its frequent attempts to resist any acknowledgment of these debts—the historical disputes over the Lockean or Thomistic nature of the American founding expresses itself in our theoretical disputes regarding the relationship between morality
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Missing It and Battlestar Gallactica Farewell
I've not been writing because I've been busy with other things, and I am very much in this slack water mode. It seems as though events outrace anything I or anyone else has to say about them with any hope of writing anything truly insightful or helpful. Almost everything I read seems idiotic or at
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The Rich Are Different from You and Me
Because they have the resources to live in a bubble world of their own creation. Frank Rich today: The once-lionized lifestyles of the rich and infamous were appallingly tacky. John Thain’s parchment trash can was merely the tip of the kitschy iceberg. The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height
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True Believers (Updated)
Mark Kleiman: Brooks fears that Barack Obama's ambition is leading him into what Oakeshott called "rationalism in politics." But thinking of it that way just shows how hopelessly off-base Brooks's criticism is. Obama isn't working out the details of some grand vision; he is doing what Machiavelli called "temporizing with accidents." He has specifically referred
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Culture vs. Politics
Noah Millman has an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate begun by Damon Linker at TNR which was taken up by Deneen and Larison. (All the appropriate links to earlier posts on this question can be found on the posts I link to above.) Linker, I think, misjudges Larison and Deneen, but not Millman insofar
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Movie Treatment: The Second Civil War (Updated)
Treatment for a first episode in bad made-for-TV miniseries: It's 2011. As credits roll in the opening, scenes of lines at soup kitchens, tent cities, a radio newcast voiceover describes a food riot in Miami, survivalists in a firefight with mobile marauders in the Northwest, another voiceover editorializes about the failure of the Obama administration's
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Right America: Feeling Wronged
I watched Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary last night. Pelosi wants to show that there are two Americas which are incapable of understanding one another. Her film is an attempt from the Liberal side to at least listen sympathetically to what the conservative side has to say, even if some rapprochement is at the end of
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Doubt & Belief
Douthat puts it nicely in a post last week: As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious
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End of the Culture Wars
The bottom line on this vast and complicated subject is that the "culture wars" will never die in the fever swamps of the Right where they were nourished if not conceived, particularly on the abortion issues; that protecting the cultural status quo is a vastly more powerful position that progressives should aspire to occupy; and