In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of reviews.
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False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947, by George Selgin. University of Chicago Press, 2025, 384 pages, $35.00. As a policy regime, the New Deal remains an ingrained part of America’s political consciousness. Those confident in state action view President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression as proof that bold interventionist policies are effective, with every new crisis—such as the call for a “Green New Deal”—reviving this supposed lesson. In contrast, skeptics view Roosevelt as having pushed the United States towards European collectivism, leading…
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The American right is in a period of intellectual tumult. Part of that reckoning includes wondering what novels are and what they are for. It is impressive that we should are even talking about it. Our commercial and technological mores imply that we wouldn’t even bother to burn books—they would simply be rendered obsolete by entertainment, as well as AI. Literature faces a cultural challenge as well as a technological one: it’s about white men. One attack on the novel and novelists revolves around racism, whether it’s Mark Twain using…
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The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, by Daniel J. Flynn. Encounter Books, 2025, 544 pages, $41.99. To the vast majority of Americans, the name Frank S. Meyer means nothing. It did to me prior to reading Daniel J. Flynn’s new biography, The Man Who Invented Conservatism. I was born in 2006, nearly a century after Meyer’s birth. My mother had not even left Cuba when he died. Yet, in reading Flynn’s detailed biography, I came to realize that I lived in his shadow’s shadow.…
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Philip Pilkington, The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order, Polity Press (2025), 240 pages, $22.95. When global communism collapsed a generation ago, it not only freed several hundred million people from tyranny, but also stimulated a search for the causes of the death of a system that once posed an existential threat to capitalism and liberal democracy. Academic research over the last three decades may differ on details, but a broad consensus seems to exist as to the general causes of the demise of…
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The early 2010s television series The Newsroom has not aged well, its moral earnestness about the singular vocation of the Fourth Estate having long since run aground in the era of “fake news” and politicized fact-checking. As a snapshot of American ideals during the Obama years, however, it remains memorable. Consider the famous opening scene of the first episode, where the star, Will McAvoy, a popular TV news anchor, shares the stage at Columbia University with a prominent liberal pundit and a prominent conservative pundit. Asked by a rather vapid sorority girl,…
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It’s not all in your head; they really are out to get you. This is the message of director Ari Aster’s films: Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, and now the horror-comedy-Western, Eddington. Each explores the premonition that forces beyond our imagination, outside the frame, have a wicked plan that is slowly coming to fruition—and you’re a part of it. This makes Aster the perfect storyteller for our conspiracy-theory-addled age. With Hereditary, that force was a dead grandmother’s demonic cult preying upon her descendants; with Midsommar, a pagan sect’s plot against…
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The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization, by George Hawley. De Gruyter, 2024, 184 pages, $42.99. I am not, generally speaking, an admirer of Elon Musk’s social media presence. I nonetheless confess to having been amused by an X posting of his. It featured a picture of a boy and his father sitting together. The boy complains, “Daddy, my leg hurts.” To which the father replies: “The left one or the far-right?” The joke lands because it captures a real phenomenon. In the Trump…
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Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art, by Walter McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025, 336 pages, $32.99. It is a common observation that we Americans do not know our history. Nevertheless, we are awash in historical argument, usually of the clumsily inaccurate and politically motivated variety. Be it the comparisons to Philadelphia 1776, Munich 1938, or Selma 1965, talking heads and popular historians seek to make sense of the present or advocate for their vision of the future through hackneyed analogies that read events backward, remove context, simplify motives, and advocate…
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Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States, by Daniel B. Rodriguez. Cambridge University Press, 354 pages, $39.99. Any attorney litigating a constitutional challenge to a state statute is going to see two words in the government lawyer’s brief: “police power.” In my years as a public interest attorney, I lost count of how many adjectives counsel conjoined to that term. “Vast,” “sweeping,” and “plenary” were common. Yes, these advocates will begrudgingly admit that there are certain constitutional limits—called “rights”—to the state’s power to legislate for public health, safety,…
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Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30.00 Abundance, the much-anticipated manifesto from the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Beginning with a vision of the world in 2050, full of clean energy, plentiful housing, and advanced technology, they work backwards to a rallying cry for a politics that sweeps away zero-sum thinking and bureaucratic meddling in favor of…