Richard M. Reinsch II

So this is how it begins. Paul Ryan, one of today’s most consequential national politicians, finds his proposed entitlement reform plan under fire from the ambitious, the confused, and the naïve. Symbolizing the ambitious is Democrat Kathy Hochul, whose special-election victory last week in a conservative upstate New York Congressional district illuminated the path to victory for the Democratic Party: delegitimize the very notion of Medicare reform by insisting that you are fighting against conservative avarice, while you calculate that the blame for America’s coming fiscal meltdown, which you have made inevitable, will fall on other shoulders. Hochul’s victory has become a moment of revealed truth in our politics. (more)

In what is becoming a signature move of a defeated political coalition, Democratic members of the Indiana state legislature followed their Wisconsin counterparts and fled Hoosierland this week. Ostensibly done to avoid voting on legislation that would make Indiana a “right-to-work” jurisdiction, the real devil for Indiana Democrats may not be this “union-busting” legislation. After all, private-sector unionization -- the bill’s key target -- is now the sick old man within labor’s empire. Rather, the real fear of fly-by-night Democrats is recently introduced legislation that would establish path-breaking statewide tuition scholarships enabling students from low and middle income families to choose their own school. By running, these politicians are signaling blanket opposition to the education reform proposals of a conservative coalition led by Governor Mitch Daniels. (more)

In his latest book, A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ’n’ Roll, Mark Judge reinterprets the sexual revolution through the looking-glass of its most dominant institutional contributors and critics. Judge argues that undergirding the sexual revolution was a germ of truth that preexisting cultural patterns were impotent in preventing. That is, the deep sexual communion of the couple—its unique power—reveals the self to itself and to the beloved in unimaginable ways. Eros demands that it be accounted for by those who participate in it. Perhaps America had prevented this accounting for too long, or the preexisting cultural, religious, and legal norms were themselves mechanisms that productively and safely channeled this overwhelming feature of human experiences. Judge correctly notes that the sexual revolution was actually set to begin four decades earlier in the roaring 20s but was forestalled by economic devastation and World War II, not to mention the New Deal policies which strangely reinforced the nuclear family of the industrial age. (more)

Barack Obama’s precipitous rise to the White House and his awesome expansion of federal power are frequently explained either as the products of failure or as crucial elements in progressivism’s undoing of American Constitutionalism. While each account is not exclusive of the other, both seek an explanation for the challenges posed by Obama’s presidency to self-government properly understood. The former wagers that the distorting effects of Bush’s foreign policy, a badly flawed Republican Party, and the 2008 market crash were crucial to his mastery of fortune. President Obama stands as the accidental leader. The comforting thought is that as political prospects for Obama have grown dimmer, the repeal of Obama’s mandate to govern is surely just around the bend of the Potomac. We conservatives can almost see it. Alternatively, other more trenchant observations point towards the ongoing corruption of America’s founding spirit. Within this tale of deformation, occurring for well nigh a century, President Obama represents a fresh and dramatic episode in government expansion. (more)