Steven F. Hayward

Will we witness the strange death of conservative—or liberal—America?

It may well be impossible ever to make a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby that can successfully live up to the full majesty of the novel. Hollywood has tried it five times, each with disappointing results despite impressive casts including Robert Redford and, most recently, Leo DiCaprio. The…

Cambria, Calif.

Cambria, Calif.

That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?

The contest for loneliest person on the right in Donald Trump's Washington would be hard fought among free traders, pro-immigration libertarians, neoconservative globalists, and fiscal hawks convinced of the necessity of entitlement reform. But none of these could possibly be as lonely as the…

The contest for loneliest person on the right in Donald Trump’s Washington would be hard fought among free traders, pro-immigration libertarians, neoconservative globalists, and fiscal hawks convinced of the necessity of entitlement reform. But none of these could possibly be as lonely as the…

"But free government would be an absurdity did it require citizens all like Abraham Lincoln; yet it would be an impossibility if it could not from time to time find leaders with something of his understanding." —Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided For months it has been clear that in one…

One way of looking at this presidential election is to think of it as a fluke, though not one the Founders didn’t anticipate. It is not unusual for a major party to choose an exceedingly weak or implausible nominee—think of Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, or Michael Dukakis—who is clearly…

One criticism that can be made of Patrick Allitt is that he usually writes with the historian’s “objective” detachment, concealing his own opinions or conclusions about his subject matter. His previous histories, on religion and on American conservatism, are very well done; but at the end you have…

While the campus grievance mongers cry for Justice! and continue their drive for power and safe spaces, I note an extraordinary story in the latest issue of Stanford, the bimonthly magazine of the Stanford Alumni Association. Take this in very slowly:

Over the years, “agency capture” has been a staple of the economic analysis of regulation—the phenomenon whereby regulatory agencies would come to be largely controlled by the industries they purported to regulate, or at the very least would protect those industries as a cartel in a tradeoff for…

To begin to convey a sense of what an extraordinary and compelling figure Harry V. Jaffa was, I offer a confession: The only class notes I have kept from college or graduate school are contained in the dog-eared, green notebook from my courses with Jaffa, and I keep it in my top desk drawer. In…

Populism, that ever-lurking and always problematic phenomenon in American politics, is especially galling to liberals when it breaks from the right, as it has done during the last few years in the form of the Tea Party. Conservative populism disorients and frightens liberals (almost as much as the…

The climate change crusaders, who have been at it for a quarter-century, appear to be going clinically mad. Start with the rhetorical monotony and worship of authority (“97 percent of all scientists agree!”), add the Salem witch trial-style intimidation and persecution of dissenters, and the…

Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page…

It may be overdone to say that the Obama administration aims to shove America in the direction of European social democracy, but there’s one domain where this is surely true: energy policy. Any number of administration diktats and subsidy schemes, from Solyndra to proposed EPA strangulation of…

Most critiques of environmentalism have become as dreary and predictable as environmentalism itself. Environmentalists, their critics (myself included) never tire of telling us, grossly exaggerate problems, promote endless bureaucracy, corrupt the law, and engage in relentless scaremongering—or at…

The Cold War is now so over that it might as well be grouped with the ancient ice ages, but there is one echo rolling across Europe from East to West: the Russian attempt to dominate the natural gas market on the European continent. As the energy sector accounts for 25 percent of Russia’s economy,…

This magisterial three--volume biography of Winston Church-ill, begun by William Manchester nearly 30 years ago, has at last reached completion, though the path to its finale took a circuitous trip through the wilderness, reminiscent of Churchill himself. The Last Lion is doubtless the most popular…

The never-ending Democratic attempt to resurrect the strategy that destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964—he’s an extremist, don’t you know—rolls on, with liberals and the media trying to tar the Republican party as an “ideological outlier” in American politics. 

The forlorn and increasingly desperate climate campaign achieved a new level of ineptitude last week when what had looked like a minor embarrassment for one of its critics​—​the Chicago-based Heartland Institute​—​turned out to be a full-fledged catastrophe for itself. A moment’s reflection on the…

The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden…

The spectacular collapse of Solyndra has all of the trappings of an epic Washington scandal, with serial revelations of embarrassing and potentially improper White House machinations to secure a $535 million federal loan guarantee for a startup company with dubious prospects of success. The sudden…

By now just about everyone has jumped on board the natural gas bandwagon (see “The Gas Revolution,” April 18, 2011). Its newfound abundance inside the four corners of the United States is proving to be a disruptive factor in the nation’s energy mix. Cheap natural gas adds to the pressure on…

When Andrew Liveris took over as CEO of Dow Chemical at the end of 2004, the company was in the midst of a wrenching reorganization that saw it shed 7,000 jobs​—​14 percent of its workforce​—​and close 23 older chemical plants in this country. Looking ahead to a new product cycle in a fast-growing…

The catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is being regarded as the atomic power equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which set back offshore oil drilling just as it appeared on the brink of a substantial expansion. This means we’ve now come…

The Climate Fix

With the collapse of cap and trade in the Senate and the prospects dim for a measly renewable-energy mandate for electric utilities in a lame duck session, the dreams and schemes of the climate campaign and energy reformers have hit the wall. As long as oil prices remain moderate and gasoline…

With the ignominious collapse of cap and trade legislation in the Senate, the climate campaign is licking its wounds and wondering where it went wrong. Greens are pointing fingers at the bad economy, the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, and those dastardly Earth-hating Republicans. But they ought to…

If you think the health care debate is a tangled mess, try wading into the thickets of the energy sector, which is high on the Obama administration’s list of targets to subjugate. Few areas of national policy offer as bad a ratio of blather to substance as energy. It is a field where cliché,…

Environmentalists are used to wallowing in misery--in fact, it makes them happy--but the 40th anniversary of Earth Day this week should offer up an extra helping of woe, for the movement has lost its mojo. Opinion surveys show not only that public belief in and concern for global warming is…

The climate campaign, built step-by-step over the last 20 years, has reached its Waterloo. The Copenhagen conference that ended Friday was an exercise in political theater. It not only failed to produce a binding agreement, but the potential emissions curbs it endorsed fall far below what climate…

So Van Jones now takes his place as the Lani Guinier of the Obama administration, undone by his radical views. Like Guinier, the ousted "green jobs" czar will doubtless employ his political martyrdom to transform himself from a minor celebrity of the left into a major celebrity of the left, with a…

The Conservatives

Presidential Command

Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin's fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people's capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affirm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly…

Churchill and the Jews

Liberal Fascism

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution

On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain's largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article's allegation--that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations…

The President, the Pope,

Our Endangered Values

CLIMATE CHANGE IS HEATING UP again in American politics, the result of an orchestrated campaign to push the issue to the forefront. Al Gore is hitting the road with his animated computer slide show and has a documentary movie coming out. Climate action advocates skillfully exploited the Bush…

Morning in America

Searching for Joaquin

The River War An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan by Winston Churchill Carroll & Graff, 380 pp., $14 INNUMERABLE COMPARISONS HAVE BEEN MADE, in the days since September 11, to World War II and especially to Winston Churchill's wartime leadership. In some ways, of course, the comparison is…