Partisan Freedom

This review of Whose Freedom: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff originally appeared in Policy Review.

Freedom at War

This book review originally appeared in The Weekly Standard.

Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency by Richard A. Posner, Oxford, 208 pp., $18.95

In late June, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times breathlessly reported on the front page, above the fold and under a big headline, that in the just-announced case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court “shredded each of the administration’s arguments.”

War-Torn Democrats

This book review originally appeared in Policy Review.

Will Marshall, editor.  With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.  Rowman and Littlefield. 252 pages. $19.95

Peter Beinart.  The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  HarperCollins. 288 pages. $25.95

In 1907, in tribute to Secretary of State Elihu Root, President Theodore Roosevelt observed that a public official “must feel that he is the servant of the people.

The Case Against Compromise

This book review originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

It is fairly certain that a book titled The Party of Death is not calculated to bridge differences, find common ground or in any other way still the controversy that has roiled American politics for more than 30 years. 

When Liberalism Was Young

This review of John Stuart Mill: A Biography by Nicholas Capaldi originally appeared in The Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006.

Gentlemen Revolutionaries

This book review originally appeared in Policy Review.

Gordon Wood.  Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different.  The Penguin Press. 306 pages. $25.95

The natural inclination to simplify public reality to suit private interests is amply illustrated by the attempts of successive waves of scholars to present America’s founders as the standard bearers for one favorite idea or another to the exclusion of all the rest.

Unscholarly Scholars: Mearsheimer, Walt, and “The Israel Lobby”

This essay was originally prepared for an Israeli newspaper but never made its way into print.

In the March 23 issue of the prestigious London Review of Books, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs and academic dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, published The Israel Lobby.  Their lengthy essay argues that a loose group of formal lobbyists, op-ed columnists, magazine editors, think tanks, wealthy Jews, and Jews in the Bush administration hijacked American foreign policy and brainwashed the American public and political leadership alike. 

Progressives for Growth

This book review originally appeared in Policy Review.

Benjamin M. Friedman. The Moral Consequences of Growth. Harvard University Press. 570 pages. $29.50

Gene Sperling. The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity. Simon and Schuster. 368 pages. $26.95

Is there a political matter concerning which partisans divide more predictably or which even informed citizens understand less adequately than economics?

U.S. Military: 8, Elite Law Schools: 0

This essay originally appeared in The Weekly Standard.

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS’S UNANIMOUS opinion for the Supreme Court in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Individual Rights, upholding the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment against challenge by a coalition of law schools and law faculties, decisively resolved the essential legal issues presented by the case. The 8-0 decision (Justice Alito did not participate) made matters crystal clear: Congress, without infringing law schools’ and law professors’ First Amendment rights of speech and association, may condition federal funding to universities on law schools’ granting access to military recruiters equal to that provided other employers. The Solomon Amendment leaves law schools perfectly free to keep the military off campus and away from their students–if they can persuade the universities of which they are a part to decline the millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, the universities receive in federal funds.

Summers’s End

This essay originally appeared in The Weekly Standard.

The significance of Lawrence Summers’s resignation under fire as president of Harvard University has been widely misunderstood. Oozing sympathy for a beleaguered and aggrieved Harvard faculty, the Boston Globe editorial page argued that because he was “arrogant” and “brusque,” in short a “bully,” Summers was “losing the ability to be effective” and so it was “sensible,” and in the interests of all, for him to step down. A sympathetic editorial in the Washington Post portrayed Summers as a martyr, a foe of “complacencies and prejudices” who was forced to fall on his sword by a “loud and unreasonable” minority. An angry Wall Street Journal editorial, which colorfully decried “a largely left-wing faculty that has about as much intellectual diversity as the Pyongyang parliament,” portrayed Summers as a victim whose apology, “in the wake of his ‘gender’ comments,” failed “to placate his liberal critics.”