Diversity vs. Solidarity

The upcoming GOP primary donnybrook between the establishment right and the antiestablishment right has had a foreshadowing in Polish politics over the past dozen years in the war between Poland's two dominant parties, both conservative. If you want to know what a Trump presidency might be like, ...

Deep State of the Union

The 20th-century Turkish concept of a "€œdeep state"€ first spread to other Mediterranean countries such as Italy, and is now slowly being picked up by American pundits. Ex"€“Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren's 2016 book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise ...

Forecasting a Million Muslim Mob

In the news and opinion business, late December and early January are the dead season as journalists go on vacation, leaving behind their canned top 10 lists for last year and forecasts for the new year. I"€™m not much of a fan of either, but I do approve of the modest increase in recent years ...

Tom Stoppard

A “€˜Problem”€™ Worth Addressing

As a Christmas present, I received the book version of The Hard Problem, the latest play by Sir Tom Stoppard. It's the great Tory playwright's first new work for the stage since his Rock "€™n"€™ Roll in 2006. Granted, it's perfectly reasonable to complain that a playwright who is best enjoyed ...

Immigration Insurance

I average over 400 comments per day over on my iSteve blog on the Unz Review. One advantage of reading all of them is that ideas are dropped in my lap that I wouldn"€™t hear anywhere else. For example, after the San Bernardino massacre earlier this month, when Americans were beginning to wonder ...

The Bubble, Hollywood-Style

The Big Short, a comedy starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt as finance-industry renegades betting against the Housing Bubble in 2005"€“08, is another in the rather improbable new genre of nonfiction feature films that display the business world with more complexity ...

Marine Le Pen or Tashfeen Malik?

French history is currently speeding up, which ought to be of intense interest to American Republicans pondering whom to nominate in 2016. While many Americans enjoy engaging in lowbrow derision of France, the French traditionally value displays of intelligence, and thus are often the first to work ...

Turf: The Problem and the Promise

That human beings are somewhat territorial animals is a concept that has gone out of intellectual fashion, but it offers useful insights into much of what is in the news. For example, the ongoing Black Autumn protests on college campuses are in part an outgrowth of the near-universal demand for ...

Strong Mutually Antagonistic Governments Everywhere

In the spirit of Aristotelian moderation, allow me to suggest that an emerging danger of the 21st century is that the non-Western world could get overly right-wing. Ironically, a major cause would be that white Western liberals are focusing all of their firepower"€”using as cat's paws flagrantly ...

Four Ways to Save Europe

Last week, America's institutions of higher learning were in turmoil over Halloween costumes. How can minority students survive Yale if their diktats are ever subjected to skepticism from grown-ups? This week, we are told to not get too excited over 129 people being slaughtered in the streets, ...