Books

America in the Age of Trump is a bracing, essential look at the failure of a great nation to meet the needs of its people and the challenges of the age—and the resulting collapse of public trust in government, as well as a pervasive crisis of national values, from broken families to a loss of faith in the American idea itself.

In this book, Peter J. Wallison argues that the administrative agencies of the executive branch have gradually taken over the legislative role of Congress, resulting in what many call the administrative state. The judiciary bears the major responsibility for this development because it has failed to carry out its primary constitutional responsibility: to enforce the constitutional separation of powers by ensuring that the elected branches of government―the legislative and the executive―remain independent and separate from one another.

What do leaders need to know to be effective? Carnes Lord—a political scientist with extensive experience at high levels of American government—here offers witty and trenchant counsel to both leaders and the citizens who elect them.

What is culture? Why should we preserve it, and how? In this book renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends Western culture against its internal critics and external enemies, and argues that rumours of its death are seriously exaggerated.

The Republican Workers Party is the future of American presidential politics, says F.H. Buckley. It’s a socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road party, offering a way back to the land of opportunity where our children will have it better than we did.

Few Americans are aware that Washington is the country’s largest single patron of art. Every year a group of unelected federal bureaucrats and congressmen spends millions of taxpayer dollars on monuments, sculptures, buildings, plays, and exhibitions, largely without public knowledge or involvement.

In Zero Hour for Gen X, Matthew Hennessey calls on Generation X to take a stand against tech-obsessed Millennials, apathetic Baby Boomers, utopian Silicon Valley “visionaries,” and the menace to top them all: the soft totalitarian conspiracy known as the Internet of Things. Soon Gen Xers will be the only cohort of Americans who remember life as it was lived before the arrival of the Internet. They are, as Hennessey dubs them, “the last analog generation,” the sole remaining link to a time when childhood was still a bit dangerous but produced adults who were naturally resilient.

Though many people know that American universities now offer an inadequate and incoherent education from a leftist viewpoint that excludes moderate and conservative ideas, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how bad it is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need, Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of their decline in administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the effects of the decline on teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the decline.

Andrew Forge was an English painter and a teacher of painting (Yale University 1975–1994), renowned and respected on both sides of the Atlantic. But he was also known for his writing on the arts, spanning almost fifty years, which was admired for the delicacy and openness of his language and the ways in which he thought about the processes of perception in all their sensual possibilities.

The success of the Trump presidency will be judged in large part on the president’s ability to reduce the size and scope of the deep state. The unelected, unaccountable permanent bureaucratic leviathan that winds itself around the body politic and squeezes its life out must be dismantled if Trump’s legacy is to be a permanent restoration of republican government.

Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature.

Are robots finally replacing humans? Does the emerging age of artificial intelligence and automation mean we will soon see “peak jobs” and the need for a Universal Basic Income to support a widening swath of hapless citizens unsuited for employment in a future “knowledge” workforce? Productivity—reducing labor-hours per unit of product or service—has been the hallmark of progress for centuries.

In Western Civilization, the arts embody the eternal battle between good and evil, and through understanding the arts, we can address the political issues that plague us. Far from being museum pieces, simple recreation, or tales and artifacts from the past, the arts should be seen at the wellspring of our politics, and in particular in public policy debates. They are actually the reason we have public and foreign policy in the first place.

President Donald J. Trump said he wants to “drain the swamp.” But is it a swamp or an ocean? It’s about time the American people had some hard facts regarding the federal bureaucracy.

In Operation Drain the Swamp, we expose all of it. We showcase who receives how much, where they work, and what they do. Most importantly, we reveal how much these bureaucrats cost the American taxpayer.

In recent years, politicians led by President Obama and prominent senators and governors have teamed with extremists on campus to portray our nation’s institutions of higher learning as awash in a violent crime wave—and to suggest (preposterously) that university leaders, professors, and students are indifferent to female sexual assault victims in their midst. Neither of these claims has any bearing to reality. But they have achieved widespread acceptance, thanks in part to misleading alarums from the Obama administration and biased media coverage led by The New York Times.