James W. Ceaser is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a prominent scholar of American political thought and political parties. He was a prolific contributor to The Weekly Standard from 1997 to 2018, writing extensively on elections, party politics, democratic theory, and the intellectual currents shaping American conservatism and liberalism. His academic perspective brought analytical depth to the magazine's coverage of political culture and presidential leadership.
It has been over a half-century since the heralded British political theorist Michael Oakeshott published his most acclaimed work, Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott put forward the thesis that since the 18th century the culture and politics of the West have come to operate under the sway of a…
Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…
Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…
The university is often said to be the first place in our society to look for the truth. Unfortunately, it is now one of the last places to find it.
Americans awoke on the morning of 11/9 to a different political world. There is only one word to explain what happened, and it is called democracy.
Americans awoke on the morning of 11/9 to a different political world. There is only one word to explain what happened, and it is called democracy.
It is a fact well known to every student of the Constitution that the Framers' fourth national institution—the presidential selection system—never functioned as intended. Yet the 2016 presidential election keeps bringing the Framers' concerns to the forefront, as we lose control of every item on…
As a futurist, Herman Kahn’s job was to think about the unthinkable. And the unthinkable subject in the 1960s was thermonuclear war. Kahn's analysis struck a nerve; going beyond consideration of how to prevent a nuclear war, he assessed how the United States could survive and win one. This step…
Anger is all the rage these days in American politics. A recent New York Times column bore the headline “The Year of the Angry Voter," while an earlier Washington Post story read "It's Not Just Trump: Voter Anger Fuels Outsider Candidates." Our nation's choleric mood has not gone unnoticed in other…
A strange period has now passed into history. Captivated by a presidential campaign in 2008, Americans by the millions came to believe that a new leader would be able to produce more than a transformed society and an era of world peace. Politics could be extended beyond its ordinary boundaries and…
From almost the moment President Obama assumed office, observers began calling attention to his unusual proclivity to use the pronoun I. In one of the earliest notices of this practice, an alarmed Terence Jeffrey of CNS News counted 34 I’s in the president’s speech on the federal rescue of General…
Walter Berns, a leading figure in the study of constitutional law for nearly half a century, enjoyed an advantage over most other scholars in this field: He never attended law school. Unburdened by this professional training, Berns brought to his subject the fresh perspective of an outsider who had…
There are no copyrights on book titles. F. H. Buckley nevertheless shows remarkable audacity in borrowing The Once and Future King from T. H. White’s children’s classic, published in 1958. White enchanted his readers with a fantasy based on the Arthurian legend, replete with swords and sorcery,…
Every student of American religious history has heard of the event known as “the Great Disappointment.” In 1818 William Miller, a former naval captain turned lay Baptist preacher, developed a new method for calculating biblical chronology to arrive at the conclusion that the millennium would take…
For the small school of political analysis that draws its inspiration from the great French 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, the cardinal methodological rule is to begin from what one can know “so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.” The only important fact about the…
With the Republican nomination now settled, electoral analysts are rolling out their models of voter behavior to predict the outcome of the general election. These “scientific” efforts at prophecy, which have become increasingly elaborate and arcane, boil down in the end to gauging voters’…
Whatever else the grandiose project of “building Europe” may have accomplished—and at this point the entire edifice seems to be teetering—it has proven an enormous boon to social scientists and legal scholars. Scores of research centers, study groups, and commissions have been created both in…
Whatever else the grandiose project of “building Europe” may have accomplished—and at this point the entire edifice seems to be teetering—it has proven an enormous boon to social scientists and legal scholars. Scores of research centers, study groups, and commissions have been created both in…
If, as most pundits now believe, Mitt Romney has the inside track for the Republican nomination, he is the first GOP candidate in more than a generation not to be syntactically challenged. Just look at the list of the party’s choices since Richard Nixon, whether elected (Ronald Reagan, George H. W.…
While most Americans spend their Labor Day weekend savoring the last moments of summer vacation, political scientists are normally hard at work at their annual association meeting, held this year in Seattle. This event is usually a rather sedate affair, with scholars debating such recondite…
The Neoconservative Persuasion
Barack Obama has now been center stage for two years—one as a presidential candidate (and president elect) and one as president. Americans have begun to take their measure of the man, judging him to have been a remarkable success in his first role and struggling in his second. Obama recently…
President Obama faces the unprecedented challenge of being a war president in charge of a peace party. His emergence in this new role less than a week before he picks up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo has been some time in coming. It was one thing for Obama to speak of Afghanistan as the good war…
How low can you go? This is the question confronting the nation in the aftermath of President Obama's deep bow to the Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko last Saturday.
Democrats are clinging stubbornly to their new religion of "realism" and "pragmatism" in foreign affairs. Even where prudence dictates otherwise, as it surely does in responding to the fraudulent Iranian election and its aftermath, President Obama has been tepid at best in condemning the conduct of…
In the rare moments that public intellectuals have not been extolling President Obama's supposed new philosophy of pragmatism, they have turned their efforts to writing requiems for conservatism. These contributions offer variations on the same theme. The conservative movement is dead or dying, the…
Social science has confirmed what political observers have been telling us for months: There is a clamor in America to dampen the spirit of intense partisanship that prevails in Washington. A recent survey sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Economist showed that seven in ten Americans wish…
Manchester, NH
WILL ANY OF the Democratic candidates be able to summon the courage to concede an American victory in Iraq?
Twice during the past half century, the Democratic party has faced a challenge from its left wing. In the late 1960s, it was the mass movement of the New Left that rose up to defy the party's liberal-progressive core. Following a contest of ideas and of wills, the liberal center collapsed and…
Honor
THE STIRRINGS OF A NEW wave of democracy are underway in one of the least probable regions of the world: the Middle East and Central Asia. Elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian territory, and Lebanon, together with rumblings of liberalization in Egypt, are tangible signs of a growing…
TWO CONTRASTING CONCLUSIONS can be drawn by comparing the famous Red-Blue divide on the electoral maps of 2000 and 2004. One is that there has been very little change in electoral patterns, the other that there was change of significant proportions. Thus far, most commentators have favored the…
Who Are We?
WHAT DO CONSERVATIVES think today about History? As President Bush readies the nation for war, an abstract question like this one seems out of place. And yet, having raised this theme himself in recent speeches, President Bush has been faced both at home and abroad with widespread criticism for his…
ON HIS TRIP to Europe next week, President Bush will encounter more discontent among our allies than at any time in recent memory. A gulf is opening between our two continents, and the reasons are not just temporary or political. Deep-seated trends in Europe, quite apart from President Bush's…
One hundred and sixteen years ago Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced Western civilization ready to move "Beyond Good and Evil," the famous title of his last major book. George W. Bush begs to differ. In so doing, he has reopened one of the great controversies of modern times. We are, says Bush, engaged…
WASHINGTON, D.C., HAS COME OF AGE. The affairs of representative Gary Condit, like those of the more illustrious politician he emulates, have at last shown the world that the American capital is a sophisticated town, the rival of its European counterparts. Just turn on the TV or read a major…
PERHAPS THE ONLY HAPPY SURPRISE so far in the NATO campaign against Serbia is that our major allies, Britain, Germany, and France, have for once proved as tough as Washington. Indeed, as the bombing campaign entered its fourth week, popular support in Europe was increasing. Far from being pressured…
In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: "President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?"
Move over Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, there's new cleavage in town: stasists versus dynamists. And their embryonic conflict will soon -- or so argues Virginia Postrel in her new book, The Future and Its Enemies -- become the main division in American politics.
In the complex relationship between sex and politics that has preoccupied Americans for the past three months, many of those seeking to condemn the president have relied on some version of the feminist principle that "the personal is political," while those seeking to excuse or exonerate him have…
Thomas G. West
"STUPOR MUNDI" (Wonder of the World) -- thus was young Otto III greeted in 996 when the pope selected him emperor in Rome. As fate chose Otto as its instrument to lead Western Christendom past the first millennium, so Bill Clinton has assumed the burden of carrying humankind over the threshold to…
ON JUNE 14, PRESIDENT CLINTON launched his highly touted "conversation" on race at the University of California, San Diego. The initiative was months in the making but, as the president would have it, a lifetime in the preparation. "If there is any issue I ought to have credibility on," he said,…