In response to:
The real legacy of the old "New Left" of the 60s and 70s is the hedonism, narcissism, indiscipline, antinomianism, and pursuit of immediate gratification that characterize our society today. The hippies took baths and took over--without changing their basic views on anything. Our country, our society, and our freedoms once rested primarily on the "bourgeois virtues" of the middle class and, secondarily, on the "noblesse oblige" of the upper crust. Today, the bourgeois virtues are expiring, as we see from the statistics on divorce, illegitimacy, and the pathologies associated with them. A cpuntry whose tone is set, and whose government is elected, by its "lumpenproletariat" will not long preserve either its prosperity or its freedom
In New York Friday to appear on Sean Hannity’s program, I stayed an extra day to catch an early performance of David Mamet's new play The Anarchist, now in its second week of previews. Sitting next to Marcello, a Brazilian venture capitalist, we chatted about the election just past.
"I do not understand you Americans. Dogs on car roofs? Really?"
I can't argue that our process isn't absurd or that our media isn't mired in the trivial. The day before I had interviewed Israel's Ambassador to the United States, historian Michael Oren, and had passed a pro-Israel demonstration in...
1. I think that I take nothing away from Madison and the Founders when I point out that they were students of history and of the great statesmen and thinkers of the past, including Aristotle.
2. Rand and the libertarians are, of course, NOT students and disciples of Aristotle--nor of Cicero, nor of the Medieval schoolmen, nor of The Federalist. Rand, though so wrong about so much, was quite right in referring to libertarians as right-wing hippies.