As James Kalb explains in his important new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism -which, despite the red-meat title, is an intellectually invigorating read - liberalism "has become an immensely powerful social reality," one so dominant "that it has become invisible."

"To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance or evil," Kalb writes. "The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of...]]> Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "Every line was lit up for several hours," a Post employee told The New York Times. "The phones on the city desk have never rung like that before."

Actually, that's not true. I'm pretty sure it was as bad or worse on the morning of Aug. 31, 2001, when a column I'd written in that morning's Post caused the switchboard to all but melt down.

What had I written? A throwaway column about the funeral of the young pop star Aaliyah, who had just died in a plane crash. I'd found the lavish plans for the public ceremony - the horse-drawn carriage up Fifth Avenue, the white doves - a bit much and used the occasion to comment critically on funerary rituals and the cult of celebrity...]]> Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But.

Obama's conciliation is largely a matter of style. Substantively, he's solidly on the cultural left. As writer Ross Douthat astutely observed, "In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to 'end' culture-war battles; it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign of the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religious language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear."

In other words, Obama has learned that the smarter way to pursue liberal cultural ends is to refrain from rubbing conservatives' collective nose in what he's doing. He's...]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 With all the problems President Barack Obama faces - the economy is now losing about 600,000 jobs a month - it's just his luck that he'd have to deal with a bunch of famous lapdogs committing indecent love acts on his leg. My inclination is to defend the nation's small-r republican honor by mocking those ding-dongs and their hokey messianism. But that's me.

A less generous response comes from a blue-collar guy who lives in the Midwest, a part of the country Ashton and Demi usually only see from their first-class window seats (if part of their pledge is to fly commercial, too). He e-mailed:

"They and Barack want me to do more, to work harder? I just bailed out every stupid...]]> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 It's time. A December CNN poll found that three out of four Americans believe mega-fraudster Bernie Madoff is the ethical standard for Wall Street. With the recession forecast to deepen throughout this year, we are going to learn more about how crooked, or at least unethical, corporate and financial bigs drove this country to near-ruin with their reckless avarice. Because of this crisis, President-elect Barack Obama warned last week that the nation faces "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come."

As Michael Lewis and David Einhorn recently explained in a New York Times column, we got to this terrible place through a political system that served the Wall Street elite at the...]]> Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 His thesis appalled academic elites of the day, who misread it as a defense of militarism. In fact, Huntington - all his life a New Deal Democrat - argued that liberals favor individualism because they take security for granted. Conservatives, including soldiers, understand that security is not in the natural order of things and that protecting our liberal order in a hostile world requires rejecting the standard liberal view of good, evil and human nature.

The Soldier and the State, despite its seeming paradoxical, ideologically inconvenient message, went on to become a realist classic - and Huntington's brilliant career was launched.

If you've heard of Sam Huntington at...]]> Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 The right has developed a vicious habit of tagging any dissenting conservative as a closet liberal. This folly has constructed an airtight bubble around the GOP and conservative leaders, not only depriving conservatism of constructive criticism from within its ranks, but also reinforcing the rank-and-file's worst instincts. If the election results didn't convince Republicans that they couldn't afford to throw people out - especially their intellectuals and people who respect intellect - then their ignorance is invincible.

This election ought to once and for all teach conservatives that Ronald Reagan is dead, and he's not coming back. The intellectual poverty of the GOP primary...]]> Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 My friends, I am neither young nor eloquent, handsome nor smooth. But I have lived a long life, much of it in service to America in war and in peace. And I have always stood for straight talk. There has been no time in our nation's recent history when the American people more needed to hear the plain truth from their leaders. A fundamental reason our country faces economic catastrophe is that we have built our lives around running from truths about the American way of life.

Washington has run from the truth. Wall Street has run from the truth. And if we're honest with ourselves, all of us have, in one way or another, run from the truth.

We have accepted the lie that we can...]]> Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mr. Wallace had his epiphany attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as research for his groundbreaking 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

The novelist saw that drunks who had hit rock bottom came to see self-help aphorisms as ladders out of hell. This was a new thing for him. In the light of suffering and intense human need, principles that many of us have come to disdain as sentimental clichés appeared as saving truths.

Mr. Wallace's observation came to mind the other day as I watched a beleaguered Wall Street executive on MSNBC try to obfuscate his company's key role in helping cause the crisis, the near-apocalypse that has delivered the U.S. financial system to the far end of...]]> Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 You don't have to find Vladimir Putin a sympathetic figure to appreciate what the world looks like from a Russian point of view. Imagine that America had lost the Cold War and gone through a decade of economic and social collapse. During this time, a victorious Soviet Union had brought several Central American nations into the Warsaw Pact and was trying to fast-track Mexico's entry. Would we feel threatened?

One would have hoped Barack Obama would meet Russia's aggression with a more balanced, realistic response. Mr. McCain's reckless anti-Russian huffing and puffing sent a strong signal that a vote for Mr. McCain is, at least on foreign policy, a vote for a third Bush term. If...]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 A Mexican immigrant housekeeper whose husband works on the road told me that her Pentecostal congregation in Dallas is the only thing she has to help her keep her teenage girls on a path to a stable future. Given the skyrocketing teen pregnancy rate among Latinas, you can see why a mother like this housekeeper gravitates toward Pentecostalism, not liberal Protestantism or laissez-faire Catholicism.

This innate cultural conservatism partly explains why the white working classes have voted Republican over the past generation (and why blacks, despite being reliably Democratic in their voting habits, are fairly conservative in their social views). Democrats see these Republican voters...]]> Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500