The website of John C. Snider
Jim Geraghty (senior political correspondent for National Review) has a guest column today in The Washington Post Opinion section titled “How did politics get so awful?? I blame MTV circa 1992,” in which he lays the blame for today’s political dysfunction in America at the feet of MTV’s “Rock the Vote” campaign, which used celebrities, humor, and sex …
The year 2022 was filled with major events, any one of which would mark it as significant. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The death of Queen Elizabeth II. The Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. The expected Republican tsunami that ended up more or less a draw. Former president Donald Trump’s ongoing legal troubles (including …
Remember when presidential candidate John McCain was confronted at a townhall by a half-addled little old lady who (mistakenly) lamented that McCain’s opponent, Barack Obama, was “a Muslim”? He immediately, firmly, but kindly, corrected her, emphasizing that Obama was a good man with whom he simply disagreed. Weeks later, McCain was visibly shaken by the …
Earlier this month, my wife and I decided to enjoy the beautiful spring weather and trek down to one of the big arts festivals in Atlanta. Parking near the festival promised to be problematic, so we opted for MARTA. As we waited for the train, we were chatted-up by a very tall (six-foot-six, at least) …
While doing a little background research a few weeks ago for my review of The World, the Flesh and the Devil (Harry Belafonte’s provocative 1959 post-nuclear-Armageddon drama), I discovered just how hard it can be sometimes to nail down what was “the first” of something. It turns out that TWTFATD, while a very early cinematic depiction of …
Francis Fukuyama was an optimist. In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, he put forth the proposition (if you’ll forgive my oversimplification) that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Western liberal democracy had finally gained a permanent foothold and there would, ultimately, be no returning to …
The Atlantic posted a headline today proposing to explain “Why the West’s Diplomacy with Russia Keeps Failing.” This is just one example of recent fatalistic declarations that all is lost with respect to Ukraine and the possibility of a Russian invasion. I confess I don’t understand headlines like this concerning the situation with Ukraine. Diplomacy …
Thoughts on the new book Smashing Statues by Erin L. Thompson On the night of January 20, 2022, workers in New York City removed an 82-year-old statue of Teddy Roosevelt from its location outside the American Museum of Natural History. The statue depicts the late president mounted heroically on a horse, with a pair of men (one …
When Joe Biden won the presidential election in November 2020, liberals across the nation started daydreaming about what Uncle Joe might do to erase the toxic legacy of his predecessor, to make things right (or at least, make them less terrible). There was a lot of (in hindsight, laughably naïve) optimism that Biden’s victory would …
Happy New Year! May your 2022 be (at least marginally) better than 2021 and 2020. One line that has repeatedly popped into my head over the last five years is from William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I fear that future historians will mark the …