Wall Street Journal

In “A War for the Soul of America,” Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University, has produced a lively chronicle of the “culture wars,” the political and intellectual clashes beginning in the 1960s pitting left-wing intellectuals and activists who sought fundamental social change against conservative and neoconservative counterparts seeking to resist it.

The two sides quarreled over “secular humanism” and the place of religion in public life; over the value of various liberation movements and the broad claims of multiculturalism; over who should control the public schools and what they should teach; and over the fundamental justice or injustice of the American experiment and of America’s role in the world.

Mr. Hartman’s book makes two main contributions. The first is his framing of the “culture wars” debate from its earliest days. It begins with what he calls “normative America,” which he describes as “an inchoate group of assumptions and aspirations shared by millions of Americans during the postwar years. Normative America prized hard work, personal responsibility, individual merit, delayed gratification, social mobility and other values that middle-class whites recognized as their own.” These values included a preference for men as breadwinners and women as homemakers, sexual discretion, and faith in God and American exceptionalism. Continue reading →

Wall Street Journal

Some books are as noteworthy for what they represent as for what they say. Such is the case with Michael Mandelbaum’s “The Road to Global Prosperity,” a concise, insightful and readable stock- taking of the state of globalization roughly five years after the financial crisis began. As one reads through Mr. Mandelbaum’s 180-odd pages of text and especially his 400-plus footnotes identifying the sources on which he has drawn, one gets the distinct impression that the book doesn’t just present Mr. Mandelbaum’s ideas but encapsulates a particularly influential view of the world.

The magazine Mr. Mandelbaum cites most frequently is the Economist. The newspaper whose reporting he relies on most heavily is The Wall Street Journal. The columnist on whose insight he draws most frequently is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. The institutions most conspicuous among the reports he cites are the Council on Foreign Relations and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. When he cites Paul Krugman, it’s not the New York Times’s GOP-basher calling for trillions more in economic stimulus but the more thoughtful winner of the Nobel Prize discussing the difficulties of currency union in Europe.

What we have in “The Road to Global Prosperity,” then, is very much an establishment view of the international economy. The core belief of the members of this globalization establishment is that the purpose of the modern state is the promotion of economic growth. Mr. Mandelbaum writes: “Between 1971 and 2011 economic issues—above all, the health of the global economy—replaced matters of war and peace as the major focus of national leaders because economic matters came to have greater effects on the countries they led.” Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal

The argument over whether Republicans won in 2004 by appealing to their base, by pumping up turnout especially among evangelical Christians, or by reaching to the middle, where they made gains among women, Catholics, and so on, continues apace. And the political consequences riding on the outcome are generally thought to be large for the future of the party. Although I agree that the way in which Republicans interpret what happened last November is crucial to the party’s future, an embrace of this either-or approach to describe how the GOP won will only cause confusion and create opportunities for Democrats.  

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The Wall Street Journal

The end of the Steve Forbes campaign came only after many jokes among the cognoscenti about the candidate’s profligacy with the family fortune and about the Forbes 2000 staff’s ceaseless barrage of news releases about their man’s progress. Some were beyond parody: “November 08, 1999 — forbes endorsed by two-time buchanan republican convention delegate.”

But the Forbes campaign is not just the story of a wealthy man with ambitions out of proportion to realistic expectations. It also marks the end of a chapter in American politics.

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The Wall Street Journal

Once upon a time, a first lady would take to the cover of Parade magazine to inspire ordinary Americans with behind-the-scenes tales about the first family’s wonderful White House life. Nowadays, the first lady takes to the cover of Tina Brown’s hot new Talk magazine, glosso di tutti glossi, to titillate star-struck Americans with behind-the-scenes tales of the president’s dysfunctional upbringing and marital infidelity.

A glossy magazine cover featuring Gwyneth Paltrow along with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, of all people, would once have been unimaginable. By now, the only question is which one will be wearing the bikini. (Gwyneth, thank God.) Jerry Springer, the onetime Cincinnati mayor turned TV freak-show host, has joined Mrs. Clinton in considering a race for the Senate. Perhaps when Sen. Clinton delivers a speech in the 107th Congress, the C-Span caption will read not “D., N.Y.,” but “My husband cheated on me because he was abused as a child!”

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