Gerard Alexander

Walter Laqueur, 1921-2018.

On the night in November 2010 that a wave of protest enabled Republicans to capture an additional 63 seats in the House of Representatives and decisively retake the majority, incoming House speaker John Boehner warned Barack Obama that the public had sent a message to “change course." Boehner…

In the long, tortured history of race in America, there are few bright spots shinier than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Democratic and Republican reformers from across the country overcame the resistance, mainly of Southern segregationists, to pass legislation that broke the back of Jim Crow. In…

An anniversary passed without much notice on September 9th. It was fifty years since President Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act. This was the first civil rights legislation to make it into law since Reconstruction, and it also marked just about the last time that commentators considered…

As if the United States doesn't stand out enough these days, yet another trend is making us more and more distinct in the world: the massive growth of our nonprofit sector. Some people hope, and others fear, that this might change the very nature of American society. Western countries have already…

Building Red America

Le Livre noir de Saddam Hussein

ON FEBRUARY 20, AN Austrian court sentenced the notorious British writer David Irving to three years in prison for denying in a 1989 speech that Auschwitz contained gas chambers. Many American observers had mixed reactions. They saw Irving as a loathsome anti-Semite but were uncomfortable with the…

RIOTERS IN FRANCE HAVE TORCHED thousands of cars, injured scores of police, burned and shattered dozens of buildings, and killed at least one person. Not knowing what to make of it all, Americans may be forgiven if they file this away as an event that has nothing to do with normal life in France in…

IT'S NOT DIFFICULT TO DETECT a level of demoralization among some Democrats that can't be explained by the loss of a single presidential election by three points. One reason may be the death, on November 2, of a myth that has long nourished the hopes of the American left--the idea that tens of…

JUST IN CASE you were worried that not enough supposedly neutral institutions and publications were gunning for George W. Bush, part of the international public health establishment just risked its reputation to join the fight. On Friday, the New York Times reported a new study in the British…

IN THE WAKE of the March 11 Madrid train bombing, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, said, "It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism." Prodi was hardly the first continental leader to implicitly criticize U.S. policy as short-sighted and to suggest that…

A YEAR AGO, possible civilian casualties loomed large in the debate over whether to invade Iraq. Opponents of the war estimated likely casualties in the hundreds of thousands. One heavily cited United Nations report projected 100,000 to 500,000 Iraqi civilians would die or suffer injury and/or…

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S foreign policy has come under withering attack in recent months. Critics accuse the administration of crossing the line that separates a foreign policy strong enough to secure U.S. interests from one so muscular that it provokes other countries to block us instead. The…