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The Long View

The Long View 2008-07-02: The Happy Anarchist; Respectable Demography; The Second Coming of Schundler

A fascinating aside on machine politics in the early twenty-first century: Readers may be surprised to hear that there is still a “Democratic Machine” in Jersey City, or indeed anywhere. In the classic sense of the term, there isn't. Certainly it is not a mass organization, commanding the

The Long View 2008-06-25: A Locomotive Pastorale

In speaking of Harry Truman, John J. Reilly mentions the small-town America that he was a part of, the same small-town America that produced the miracles of Silicon Valley. In 2008, rising gas prices were one of the many things that tipped the unwise lending practices into widespread default. Small

The Long View: 2008-06-16 The Irony of Victory; The Two Swords; Habeas Corpus

John J. Reilly mentions Pope St. Gelasius I here in reference to the Two Swords of Luke 22:38. This is a minor and somewhat obscure reference in the Gospels, and is accordingly a somewhat minor element of John’s political philosophy: No doubt the doctrine in question is not

The Long View: Grand New Party

John J. Reilly’s review of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party [Amazon link] encapsulates much of his political thinking, and should be regarded as one of his key essay’s on American politics. For example, John noted that the family structure of the 1950s was historically

The Long View 2008-06-08: None of the Above

Henry Wallace might have been President at the end of World War II, except that the party had ousted him in 1944 in favor of Truman. Wallace as President would have been quite the coup for the Soviets at the time, as some of of the men he was mooting

The Long View 2008-06-04: Toward the Courts of the Crimson Kings

At a request from a reader, I re-published ahead of schedule this review of S. M. Stirling’s In the Courts of the Crimson Kings a little less than a year ago, but I like it enough to re-publish it now when it comes around again. Here are a couple

The Long View 2008-05-31: Spelling Reform in the WSJ; The Socratic Struggle Session

John J. Reilly’s 2008 account of diversity training as a struggle session is a classic. He quickly intuited that the objective was mostly to provide legal and rhetorical cover in exchange for some time and money, a strange tax on business. A final point: Traditional autocracies were concerned with