Jim Sleeper

How to tell “the good fight” from a bad one against liberal democracy’s enemies?  In 1941, a 17-year-old at Exeter struggled with that question as World War II raged in Europe and storm clouds gathered over America. Wrestling with his demons under New Hampshire’s charcoal skies, he penned this sonnet:  When pausing in our drowsy […]

A little-remarked virtue of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is its graphic rendering of The Parable of the Frog. What? You don’t know about it and aren’t haunted by it day and night? Well, if you’re a journalist in Washington or New York, it’s no wonder. You and some colleagues are probably the hapless frog […]

In a recent New York Times review of America at the Crossroads — Francis Fukayama’s account of his change of heart on the Iraq War and the national-security strategy behind it — Paul Berman revealed perhaps more than he intended about pro-war intellectuals who are now wavering. Like Berman more than like Fukuyama, many public […]

They’re beginning to look like the old Saturday-morning cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, running in hot pursuit of the Road Runner, zooming right off a cliff and continuing to run through thin air — until he takes a look around, gulps, and plummets straight down. Well, the conservative-movement pundits hot in pursuit of liberal-faculty subversion […]

In an unforgettable review-essay in the June 2004 Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore detailed New York Times columnist David Brooks’ maddening habit of oscillating between hard-nosed journalism and conservative-movement hackery. In the first kind of column, Confessore showed, Brooks will do some serious reporting or at least chin-stroking, sounding for all the world like a disinterested […]

Excuse me, but we’ve been here already. Before our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief bumbles any further toward diverting billions of dollars from the existing budget to create “enterprise zones” and an ownership society in the Gulf Coast for people who didn’t invest their wealth justly in the first place, he — and liberals, too — might study […]

Ranting like yours against capitalism is so over, a vaguely neoconservative friend and writer of learned essays chided me last winter as I ranted, indeed, against proposals to privatize Social Security. Recently, another writer-acquaintance, David Brooks, chided French and Dutch voters for rebuffing higher living standards (more jobs and consumer goods) by refusing to ratify […]

Here I am, three days after this election, teaching a seminar on “New Conceptions of American National Identity” at Yale, where George W. Bush, John Kerry, and I overlapped as undergraduates in the late 1960s. Surely I will have to tell my students how Bush has revived an old conception of our national identity that […]

If some of us anti-Bush Americans seem on the verge of a nervous breakdown in these final days, it’s not necessarily because John Kerry is our heart’s desire or even because George W. Bush and Co., under cover of fighting terrorism, are spending the country into crushing debt that will drive the social compact back […]