This issue: November 28, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 11)

Evitable

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

Should Mitt Romney be the nominee of the Republican party for president in 2012? Perhaps. Should voters support him because he’s the “inevitable” nominee? No.

For one thing, his nomination is evitable—perhaps all too evitable (see below). For another, we are a proud, self-governing people. We’re sometimes even an obstreperous bunch—and a good thing it is for the cause of liberty. We often balk at yielding meekly to claims of inevitability. Here in America, we the people rule by electing. We don’t bow to those anointed by pundits.

The Iowa Frontrunner

The Gingrich campaign, he will tell you, is very different.

BY MICHAEL WARREN

Osage, Iowa
Newt Gingrich says he’s not a traditional politician. He certainly isn’t running a traditional campaign for president. What the former House speaker lacks in campaign infrastructure, money, and a conventional rationale for his candidacy, he’s made up for in words—lots and lots of them. And he’s willing to talk to anyone who will listen, even Iowans not eligible to vote.

“My model is very different from most politicians,” Gingrich says. “Part of the reason is, I am really ...

Anarchy in the U.S.A.

The roots of American disorder.

BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI

Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn’s call to Occupy Wall Street, it’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiers’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press. Never in living memory has a movement been so widely scrutinized and yet so deeply misunderstood.

How the West Won: Freedom and ‘killer apps’

BY ELIZABETH POWERS

Niall Ferguson’s newest book is chock-a-block with striking comparisons. For instance, if the Soviet Union was able to manufacture warheads, it could surely have produced blue jeans. But satisfying the desires of its citizens was not part of its agenda. Nor, adds Ferguson, of the other competitor for world supremacy in the 20th century, German national socialism. Thus, one arrives very quickly at why “the West,” basically liberal capitalist democracy, beat out these two formidable agents of destruction. It offers freedom to citizens, not only in the choice of goods but also in the possibility of crafting their own destiny. The West has been able to achieve this, unlike any other civilization or empire in history, and in the process surpass “the rest,” by virtue of what Ferguson calls six “killer apps”—competition, science, property ...

My Fab Flub

Andrew Ferguson, Beatle bungler

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

The tenth anniversary of the death of George Harrison came and went recently, topped off with a four-hour HBO documentary, and the occasion stirred in me a memory that was suppressed for many years, the kind that surfaces in the middle of a sleepless night and forces you to pull the pillow over your face and hum loudly and tunelessly until it passes. 

It began one mellow autumn afternoon in the 1970s, as I sat in my freshman French class at a liberal arts “multiversity” in Los Angeles. Waiting for the professor—she was always late, she was French—a classmate and I made small talk. Mike mentioned that he worked part time at the Pasadena ...

Lords of Finance vs. Lord of the Flies

If you’re not already sitting down, you may want to steady yourself before reading further. Recent polls show that the Occupy Wall Street movement is unpopular with voters! Not only that, it appears—gasp—that the Tea Party is actually more popular than Occupy Wall Street. 

Liberal bloggers think they have figured out why. Blogger Digby, a perennial source of quotes for the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, is outraged by the media’s portrayal of the movement, especially that of the New York Post and other outlets said to toe the conservative line: “It’s always gratifying to see the press defend the right of the authorities to restrict the First Amendment. The ...