LITMIR.BIZ

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was that miserable victims of communist regimes would climb walls, swim rivers, dodge bullets, and find other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time that progressive intellectuals would sentimentally proclaim that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is playing out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from Third World nations pour into Western states, academics and intellectuals present Western life as a nightmare of inequality and oppression.In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere “politico-moral” posturing about admired ethical causes—from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one’s essential decency by having the correct opinions has become a substitute for individual moral responsibility.Instead, Minogue argues, we ask that our governments carry the burden of solving our social—and especially moral—problems for us. The irony is that the more we allow the state to determine our moral order, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think. Such is the servile mind.

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We are living in an age of unprecedented upheaval. The future of Western culture is uncertain. America’s economic and political vitality are more fragile than ever. The preservation of tradition is far from guaranteed.Many have observed that we are living through a world historical moment of which Hegel spoke: a time when many of the traditional assumptions about the shape and future of culture are suddenly in play. As The New Criterion embarks on its fourth decade of publication, the magazine commemorates its commitment to the civilizing values of informed criticism with the publication of Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval.Compiling the writings of some of the greatest essayists of our time, Future Tense examines this pivotal period through a variety of lenses. Beginning with a meditation on memorials after the 9/11 attacks (Michael J. Lewis), the essays address patriotism in relation to Pericles (Victor Davis Hanson), twenty-first century American pride and leadership (Andrew Roberts), the future of religion in America (David Bentley Hart), and the unwinding of the welfare state (Kevin D. Williamson). Continuing this arc, pieces examine self-knowledge and modern technology (Anthony Daniels), the cultural capital of museums (James Panero), and the difficulties of making law in the modern world (Andrew C. McCarthy). In its penultimate essay, the book explores the possibility of a forthcoming political revolution (James Piereson), then closes with a reflection of culture’s role in the economy of life and the fragility of civilization (Roger Kimball).Taken together, these prominent writers demonstrate an acute understanding of the value of Western thought as well as the challenges it faces. Future Tense is an engaging discourse on the prospects of society and an important collection for anyone concerned with the longevity of traditional culture.

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With biting wit and amusing personal anecdotes, Harry Stein’s I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican chronicles the everyday travails and triumphs of the plucky conservatives marooned in the liberal bastions that loathe them, from Manhattan to Hollywood, to all the noxious places in between. Surrounded by the insufferably smug and self righteous – from the angry old lady with the anti-war sign affixed to her walker to the random jerk at a dinner party quoting George Soros – these intrepid souls live in a hostile world; knowing that anytime a neighbor chances to learn their views on affirmative action, big government, feminism, the environment, abortion, multi-culturalism, sex education, the reliability of The New York Times, the scariness of evangelicals or (fill in the blank), his/her face will register stunned surprise and deep confusion. Or worse.Stein gives special attention to those conservatives working in professions dominated by the liberal elite—journalism, publishing, entertainment, and academia—celebrating their guts and sharing in their disdain for the dogmatism of the self-appointed creative and intellectual class. The result is a conservative’s guide to love, work, friendship, dinner party mischief, and staying happy and un-smeared in liberal America.  

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The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security, but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy—freedom and individual liberty. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy provides a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement’s jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious “Blind Sheikh” and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his national bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter 2008), he explored government’s conscious avoidance of the terrorist threat, which made the nation vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In The Grand Jihad, he exposes a more insidious peril: government’s active concealment of the Islamist ideology that unabashedly vows to “conquer America.” With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn’t merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our midst and gradually foists Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life. The revolutionary doctrine has made common cause with an ascendant Left that also seeks radical transformation of our constitutional order. The prognosis for liberty could not be more dire.

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The 2012 election will be one of the hardest-fought in U.S. history. It is also likely to be one of the closest, a fact that brings concerns about voter fraud and bureaucratic incompetence in the conduct of elections front and center. If we don't take notice, we could see another debacle like the Bush-Gore Florida recount of 2000 in which courts and lawyers intervened in what should have involved only voters.Who's Counting? will focus attention on many problems of our election system, ranging from voter fraud to a slipshod system of vote counting that noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls “the most careless of the developed world.” In an effort to clean up our election laws, reduce fraud and increase public confidence in the integrity of the voting system, many states ranging from Georgia to Wisconsin have passed laws requiring a photo ID be shown at the polls and curbing the rampant use of absentee ballots, a tool of choice by fraudsters. The response from Obama allies has been to belittle the need for such laws and attack them as akin to the second coming of a racist tide in American life. In the summer of 2011, both Bill Clinton and DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz preposterously claimed that such laws suppressed minority voters and represented a return to the era of Jim Crow.But voter fraud is a well-documented reality in American elections. Just this year, a sheriff and county clerk in West Virginia pleaded guilty to stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent absentee ballots that changed the outcome of an election. In 2005, a state senate election in Tennessee was overturned because of voter fraud. The margin of victory? 13 votes. In 2008, the Minnesota senate race that provided the 60th vote needed to pass Obamacare was decided by a little over 300 votes. Almost 200 felons have already been convicted of voting illegally in that election and dozens of other prosecutions are still pending. Public confidence in the integrity of elections is at an all-time low. In the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2008, 62% of American voters thought that voter fraud was very common or somewhat common. Fear that elections are being stolen erodes the legitimacy of our government. That's why the vast majority of Americans support laws like Kansas's Secure and Fair Elections Act. A 2010 Rasmussen poll showed that 82% of Americans support photo ID laws.While Americans frequently demand observers and best practices in the elections of other countries, we are often blind to the need to scrutinize our own elections. We may pay the consequences in 2012 if a close election leads us into pitched partisan battles and court fights that will dwarf the Bush-Gore recount wars.

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Tariq Ramadan is a global phenomenon. A Swiss-born Muslim activist, he is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical group credited with inspiring modern Islamic radicalism. Ramadan is fluent in English, French and Arabic. In Europe, he is the most quoted and circulated writer on Islam. His writings are a regular feature of major English-speaking newspapers, but his real message is revealed in his speeches to Muslim groups in France, Africa, and the Middle East. Caroline Fourest has carefully transcribed and translated those speeches and shows that Ramdan's ingenious rhetoric is a Trojan horse, fostering the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian values of fundamentalist Islam on its latest battlefield: Western civilization.

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One of the easiest ways to increase public cynicism about elections is to change the rule book to make the laws governing how we vote more vague and less rigorous. &#8220;Reforms&#8221; have been passed amid claims they would increase voter turnout. They haven&#8217;t – but they have made it easier to commit absentee ballot and other fraud.<BR><BR>In this explosive broadside, John Fund exposes the new package of reforms being pushed by Obama and liberals in Congress. First, the White House has declared it will exercise oversight of the Census next year, compromising the apportionment of Congressional seats and federal dollars. On top of that, liberals in Congress are pushing for &#8220;universal voter registration,&#8221; a reform that is already used in a half dozen states but has only resulted in serious fraud.<br><BR>Making it easier to vote is a worthy goal. But pushing dubious measures puts the very foundation of our democracy at risk.

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No movement resembling American social conservatism exists anywhere else in the world of affluent democracy encompassing western Europe and Japan. This simple, undeniable fact has led many commentators to treat social conservatism as a &#147;retro&#8221; movement soon to disappear in the U. S. as well, an inevitable (if lagging) casualty of global modernization.Author and political activist Jeffrey Bell argues that social conservatism is uniquely American because it is in reality an outgrowth of American exceptionalism. It exists here because the founding principles of the United States&#151;centering on the belief that humanity receives its equal rights directly from God rather than from government&#151;retain a mass following among American voters, even in the wake of abandonment of belief in America&#8217;s theistic founding by elites and institutions that once espoused it. This allegiance to the founding, rather than some quasi-theocratic project by what is frequently misnamed the &#147;religious right,&#8221; accounts for social conservatism&#8217;s comparatively recent birth and persistent strength in U. S. politics&#151;and also for its absence in societies whose foundings were not rooted in the universality of God-given human rights.Bell argues that a worldwide upheaval in the 1960s set the stage for the rise of social conservatism, which had no earlier political existence. The 1960s upheaval resulted in the triumph of the social agenda of the left, particularly the sexual revolution, among elite opinion in the United States as well as in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. In subsequent decades the global left has sidelined its century-long drive for socialism and returned to its late-eighteenth-century roots in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the radical French revolutionaries known as the Jacobins, who believed human fulfillment depends on liberation from most civilized institutions, particularly organized religion and the family.Despite the many predictions of its demise, social conservatism has gained and held popular strength in the U. S. because of its roots in a theistic version of the European enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, which Bell describes and analyzes as the &#147;conservative enlightenment.&#8221; It is a rich, optimistic belief system that not only dominated the American founding but transformed society in the English-speaking world and remains an attractive alternative in the eyes of many of the world&#8217;s peoples&#151;certainly in comparison to the competing universalisms advocated by the left enlightenment and by the anti-egalitarian Islamic revival. The ability of social conservatism and of its parent, the conservative enlightenment, to revive and spread this natural law-centered democratic vision could reshape the battle of ideas that increasingly defines our post-Cold War world.

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Are you an American? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, increasing numbers of people are claiming &#147;American&#8221; as their national ancestry. In our melting pot of cultures, they are taking a stand as authentic representatives of the American nation. This growing social phenomenon serves as the launching point for a discussion of what twenty-first century Americanism means&#151;its roots and its significance&#151;and the unrelenting assault from multiculturalists who believe that the term &#147;American&#8221; either signifies nothing or is a badge of shame. Author James S. Robbins describes the foundations of the American ideal, the core set of beliefs that define American values, and the ways in which these standards have been undermined and corrupted. He also makes the case for the benefits of an objective standard of what it means to be an American and for returning to the values that turned America from an undeveloped wilderness to the most exceptional country in the world.

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