On July 5, 2011, The Boston Globe carried a story by Joanna Weiss with the title “Mormons on center stage”. She felt that we are in a Mormon moment. She may well be right.Mormons are certainly very visible on the political scene. As Republican candidates for the presidency are popping in and out at a […]

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities. Not since the 1960s, when scores of American […]

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city. I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing […]

Since the September 11 attacks, federal judges have out of necessity plunged into the real-life facts of terrorism’s twilight world of training camps, safe houses, and dry runs, as they review the Guantanamo dossiers of al Qaeda and Taliban suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even in the view of hard-bitten intelligence types, the federal […]

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.  Racial problems in the US contributed to the particular history of the urban underclass and race can never be totally ignored in this country, but the inner city today is haunted by […]

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science focuses on a single topic in each issue. In its July 2011 issue the topic is “Patrimonial Power in the Modern World”, edited by two sociologists, Julia Adams and Mounira Charrad. The topic is interesting in itself, and the several authors provide a vivid […]

Half a lifetime ago, on a hot July afternoon, I sat in the living room of international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, glued to the screen as Dutch television newscasters announced another dreary episode in the ethnic conflict of the former Yugoslavia. This time it was the capture of a small Bosnian municipality—the obscure town […]

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; […]

Some readers are wondering why I am spending so much time analyzing the political problems of a former vice president.  It is not out of any personal animus toward Mr. Gore.  Though I’m not expecting any invitations to any of Mr. Gore’s lovely homes, the doors to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens are […]

The surprisingly hopeful history of Islamist radicalism in America.