America’s Debate between Scientific Innovation and Caution
The Conservationism You Can Believe In
The Pathetic Record of Environmentalist Pessimism
This conversation with Patrick Allitt on his latest book, A Climate of Crisis, provides a historical judgment on the environmentalist movement in postwar America. We see its causes, self-understanding, and the motives and beliefs driving its adherents. Allitt, unlike most in this area, does not come to propose or critique policies, but to note the benefits and consequences that have resulted from the particular brand of environmentalism that emerged in America. Curiously, Allitt notes, environmentalism received its initial energy from the immense capacity for wealth creation that America generated in the postwar environment. This freed us to notice the damage…
Understanding the Neocons
Adam Fuller’s Taking the Fight to the Enemy: Neoconservatism and the Age of Ideology is a book so weak that it ought never to have seen the light of day. This book is poorly argued, carelessly written, and badly edited. The author and the press are equally culpable and should share responsibility. It is not easy to grasp the author’s argument. Fuller asks whether neoconservatism is a unified ideology with clearly defined boundaries, or merely a cluster of loosely related ideas shared by a crowd of influential writers over the last half century. His answer seems to be that it is…