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The great expedition to Sicily described in the sixth and seventh books of Thucydides‿ history can be depicted in a variety of ways. By some, it has been thoughtfully treated as an example of overreaching on the part of the Athenians. By others, it has been singled out as a sterling example of patriotism, courage, and grit on the part of the Syracusans. Never until now, however, has anyone examined this conflict from a Spartan perspective ‿ despite the fact that Lacedaemon was the war‿s principal beneficiary and that her intervention with the dispatch of a single Spartiate turned the tide and decided the outcome. In Sparta‿s Sicilian Proxy War, Paul Rahe first outlines the struggle‿s origins and traces its progress early on, then examines the reasons for Sparta‿s intervention, analyzes the consequences, and retells the story of Athens‿ ignominious defeat. Rarely in human history has a political community gained so much at so little cost through the efforts of a single man.

Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian BrodeurâEUR(TM)s fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. BrodeurâEUR(TM)s narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York CityâEUR(TM)s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts.Â

"Only a short while ago, it was unimaginable that our nation would face a baby formula shortage facilitated by a bureaucratic delay, or witness the national massive embarrassment of flawed military and diplomatic action, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet, our leaders and our federal agencies consistently fail the American people, despite the massive growth of these institutions. When David Bernhardt became Secretary of the Interior in the Trump Administration, he witnessed the full dysfunction of our federal agencies and learned that America's sprawling civil service was often unresponsive to the will of the nation's chief executive. In fact, agency staff aligned with the ideology of one political party often worked to actively "resist" the other. Meanwhile, our elected officials in Congress happily punted significant questions of public policy to those unaccountable agencies. In You Report to Me, Bernhardt provides a firsthand chronicle of how the bureaucratic swamp really works and reveals how unaccountable power has quietly concentrated in the administrative state over the last two decades. Drawing on his experiences working under two administrations, Bernhardt details how President Trump's enabling leadership revealed a path for curtailing the administrative state in the future. You Report to Me calls on America's leaders to turn off autopilot and retake control of this ever-multiplying, unaccountable federal bureaucracy before it completely destroys the Founders' vision of a government based on the consent of the governed"--

"Ever since Plato's Republic, the study of statecraft has been a staple of Western discourse, and so has the study of particular leaders. Although Jewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders-that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people-in particular. And yet there has been no lack of such outstanding figures, from the biblical period of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness in the Diaspora. This book, devoted to ten of the most colorful, fascinating, and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia, fills the gap. Among the ten, men and women alike, some were firmly bound to Judaic religious teachings and others less so, but guiding all of them was the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity. By the mid-20th century, the legacy of past generations would inspire modern successors bent on the re-founding of the sovereign Jewish state, one of the greatest political feats in human history. In delving into the unique circumstances and predicaments faced by these ten, and into the characteristics that mark them and their statesmanship as specifically Jewish, readers will also become familiar with what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statesmanship and, by inference, with the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow"--

"The Conservative Establishment consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. The right needs to rethink its positions on all the essential questions: race, male/female, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This book hopes to frame the direction of where the right is going"--

Well known as a political commentator and the author of sixteen novels, William F. Buckley Jr. was also a superb chronicler of travel. Getting About gathers more than one hundred of his articles about journeys by boat, train, or plane, representing a lifetime of adventure around the world‿from Annapolis to Zurich, from the Azores to the Virgin Islands. An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing. He took first place in the Magazine Article on Foreign Travel category in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for eight pieces written while “Concording around the worldâ€? in 1989. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining pieces full of exuberance and authority. Being a Bach afficionado, he composed his sentences for a well-tuned ear. Buckley‿s talent for arranging a mise-en-scÿne stands out in accounts of riding the Orient Express, skiing at Alta, or vacationing at Barbuda. Though himself a central character in the story, he never dominates it. He wrote candidly about travel misadventures, as when his sixty-foot schooner broke down in the Bahamas and was towed to Miami by a Coast Guard cutter, or when a malfunctioning compass landed his boat on a rocky shoal off Rhode Island and the Coast Guard said, “Sorry, we can‿t help you.â€? He also took a gimlet eye to the travel industry and a discriminating palate to airline food, suggesting that airports sell “a really good box lunchâ€? with celery rémoulade, fresh figs, and a nice Bordeaux. Getting About is pure enjoyment, but it also broadens the significance of Buckley‿s ſuvre. Along with Bill Meehan‿s illuminating introduction, this delightful collection helps preserve Buckley‿s legacy as his centenary, in 2025, approaches.

We live in the democratic age. So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, in his magisterial work, Democracy in America.  Tocqueville thought this meant that as each nation left behind the vestiges of its aristocracy, life for its citizens or subjects would be increasingly isolated and lonely. In America, we know of our growing isolation and loneliness.  What of the Middle East?  In the Middle East today, citizens and subjects live amid a profound tension: Familial and tribal linkages hold them fast, and at the same time rapid modernization has left them as isolated and lonely as so many Americans are today. The looming question, anticipated so long ago by Tocqueville, is how they will respond to this isolation and loneliness. Joshua Mitchell has spent years teaching Tocqueville‿s social theory, in America and the Arab Gulf, and with Tocqueville in Arabia, he offers a profound account of how the crisis of isolation and loneliness is playing out in similar and in different ways, in America and in the Middle East. We live in a time rife with mutual misunderstandings between America and the Middle East. Tocqueville in Arabia offers a guide to the present, troubled times, leavened by the author‿s hopes about the future.

Willmoore Kendall‿s influence on American conservatism began with his role as mentor to William F. Buckley, Jr. at Yale, and it has probably grown in recent years. Both a political philosopher and a political scientist, Kendall (1909‿1967) thought deeply about the core ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the American political tradition as expressed in documents ranging from colonial-era charters to the Federalist Papers‿their origins, their correct interpretation, and how well our system fulfilled them. He also warned of the potential for another civil war if citizens became too divided on fundamental ideals. Kendall posed unconventional questions, such as whether individual rights played a central role in the American tradition. On familiar questions he reached unusual conclusions, such as that Congress should legislate slowly and with minimal controversy, or that conservatives should not take a “storming-from-outsideâ€? stance against “big governmentâ€? but instead provide confident moral leadership. Besides being an incisive thinker, Kendall was an engaging teacher‿despite his cantankerous personality‿and he deployed a compelling prose style that combines meticulous logic with a colorful plain-spokenness. Today, what might be called a “Kendall schoolâ€? of thought competes with libertarianism, traditionalism, and neoconservatism among right-leaning scholas and writers. Though often imprecisely represented by followers, Kendall‿s thinking can be summarized as a combination of three elements: populism, in the sense of a political and moral faith in the American people; counter-majoritarianism, or belief in a more complex political culture than “majority ruleâ€? as it is usually understood; and an insistence on the need to maintain a “public orthodoxyâ€? or common political creed by social pressure and, if necessary, by legislation against extreme ideologies such as communism. David Frisk‿s intellectual biography focuses particularly on those three themes in Kendall‿s writing and assesses their implications. The result is a perceptive account of the career and contemporary relevance of a brilliant, original scholar of the American constitutional order.Â

"Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical without considering their historical and political origins. While each movement rejected the older American republican principles, there were differences between Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers who battled the trusts and checked immigration, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson's secular liberals who introduced state capitalism and a civil rights agenda, and the 1960s radicals who protested the Great Society and war in Vietnam. Rather than a peaceful outgrowth, each movement rose in criticism of the one before. This book succinctly and thoroughly clarifies progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism in the history of ideas. But its history of the rise of the Global American Empire is only complete with the story of its fall. The revolution of the 1960s birthed a class divide. Elites on the left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and globalization abroad. While the radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to complete their systems of Identity Politics, neoliberal elites introduced monopoly capitalism, open borders, and outsourcing. The neoliberals' economic and military failures marked a crisis of legitimacy. In the Great Awokening of Barack Obama's second term, the American oligarchs kissed the ring of Identity Politics and used the covid-19 pandemic and myths of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today a kleptocracy of incompetent, corrupt, and degenerate rulers drain the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history"--

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before "fake news" became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That's because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it's woke. Today's newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including "antiracism," intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?It all has to do with who our news media is written by-and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century-from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America's elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists' worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today's elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

Curiosity led Edward Epstein to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, such as the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. Seeking more information, he often found himself a fly on the wall at the highest reaches of the establishment, observing how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. This memoir recounts his life as a pursuer of lost truths. Some accuse Epstein of being a conspiracist, but that is incorrect. He is a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom, he searches for the missing pieces of the picture, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission. Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence may result in overturning an established narrative, as happened with the publication of Inquest, EpsteinâEUR(TM)s book about the official probe into the JFK assassination. But that is very different from looking for a conspiracy. Sometimes, EpsteinâEUR(TM)s work has in fact uncovered a deep conspiracy, as with the world diamond cartel. Other times, it has discredited belief in a conspiracy, as when he delved into the murders of numerous Black Panthers. After his findings were published in the New Yorker, newspapers including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times issued editorial apologies for their own reporting on the murders, which had suggested that an FBI conspiracy was behind them. EpsteinâEUR(TM)s primary interest has never been to advance an agenda, but rather to spot gaps in the conventional narrative and fill them in. Assume Nothing is the story of a lifelong quest for missing puzzle pieces, and also a story of self-actualization.Â

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965‿1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954‿1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America‿s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson‿s refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate. The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America‿s defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America‿s great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.

In his newest book, Charles Murray fearlessly states two controversial truths about the American population: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. If we aim to navigate public policy with wisdom and realism, these realities must be brought into the light. “Facing Reality provides a powerful overview of one perspective that those who allege sweeping forms of systemic or institutional racism find it all to convenient to ignore‿or cancel without due consideration.â€?‿Wilfred Reilly, Commentary“Facing Reality is a bold, important book which should be widely read and discussed.â€? ‿Amy L. Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for the Claremont Review of BooksThe charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities. What good can come of bringing them into the open? America‿s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed‿s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

Americans have been forced from their homes. Their jobs have been outsourced, their neighborhoods torn down to make room for freeways, their churches shuttered or taken over by social justice warriors, and their very families eviscerated by government programs that assume their functions and a hostile elite that deems them oppressive. Conservatives have always defended these elements of a rooted life as crucial to maintaining cultural continuity in the face of changing circumstances. Unfortunately, official "conservatism" has become fixated on abstract claims about freedom and the profits of "creative destruction." Conservatism has never been the only voice in America, but it is the most distinctively American voice, emerging from the customs, norms, and dispositions of its people and grounded in the conviction that the capacity for self-governance provides a distinctly human dignity. Emphasizing the ongoing strength and importance of the conservative tradition, the authors describe our Constitution's emphasis on maintaining order and balance and protecting the primary institutions of local life. Also important here is an understanding of changes in American demographics, economics, and politics. These changes complicated attempts to address the fundamentally antitraditional nature of slavery and Jim Crow, the destructive effects of globalism, and the increasing desire to look on the federal government as the guarantor of security and happiness. To reclaim our home as a people, we must rebuild the natural associations and primary institutions within which we live. This means protecting the fundamental relationships that make up our way of life. From philosophy to home construction, from theology to commerce, from charity to the essentials of household management, our ongoing practices are the source of our knowledge of truth, of one another, and of how we may live well together.

President Obama has declared that the standard by which all policies and policy outcomes are judged is fairness. He declared in 2011 that "we've sought to ensure that every citizen can count on some basic measure of security. We do this because we recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any moment, might face hard times, might face bad luck, might face a crippling illness or a layoff." And that, he says, is why we have a social safety net. He says that returning to a standard of fairness where anyone can get ahead through hard work is the "issue of our time." And perhaps it is.This book explores what it means for our economic system and our economic results to be "fair." Does it mean that everyone has a fair shot? Does it mean that everyone gets the same amount? Does it mean the government can assert the authority to forcibly take from the successful and give to the poor? Is government supposed to be Robin Hood determining who gets what? Or should the market decide that? The surprising answer: nations with free market systems that allow people to get ahead based on their own merit and achievement are the fairest of them all.