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The Long View

The Long View 2008-08-17: Some Foolish Little Thing in the Caucasus

As John J. Reilly notes here, and in his review of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, while it is important to have a sense of history, you can also be misled if you think that the past will simply be repeated. For example, with China and the United

The Long View 2008-08-02: What is Happening in China; what is happening in America

The end of this blog post by John J. Reilly is an extended reflection on where he thought American politics was going. I’d say he guessed right. There are, I know, benighted Libertarians who say that any redistribution of income is illegitimate. For my part, I preach in season

The Long View 2008-07-27: Obama in Berlin

I’ve been enjoying vacation for a couple of weeks and thus the blog has been quiet, but let’s kick it back off again with The Long View from John J. Reilly. The occasion of then Senator Barack Obama speaking to an audience in Berlin gave John J. Reilly

The Long View 2008-07-22: Ecology and Eschatology

John J. Reilly’s summary of the actual risks of popular devotions is spot on: Traditionally, the veneration of images and the cultivation of private devotions have led to actual idolatry much less often than iconoclasts have forecast. If anything, simple people had an easier time than did the educated

The Long View 2008-07-09: The Truman Show

This blog post by John J. Reilly amounts to a mini-review of David McCullough’s biography of Truman [Amazon link], which John mentioned in another post shortly before this one. I find John’s thoughts on Truman’s economic policies interesting: I don’t want to suggest that higher taxes

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