online archive

Rights, liberalism and political ideology

An interview with Matthew Rothschild, author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression. A review of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. The Warrantless Debate Over Wiretapping: Philip Bobbitt on how there are many instances in which warrantless surveillance has been held to be permissible under the Fourth Amendment. Take Al Qaeda to Court: The United States does not need a new and untested detention system for terrorists. Amitai Etzioni on why terrorists are neither criminals nor soldiers. A review of The Al Qaeda Reader, ed. Raymond Ibrahim.

Wake up to reality — and sense: Four excerpts from Andrew Anthony's The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence; Anthony is in a fury, but it is a neocon myth that the left has compromised its principles in its opposition to the war on terror; where we went wrong: Andrew Anthony is right: liberals have indeed failed. Just not in the way he thinks; guilt-ridden liberals need to start standing up for their ideals and values rather than falling out among themselves; but it's not worth the risk of intervening in the wretched response to Andrew Anthony's bookl and chill, Andrew: September 11 changed the world but only as much as you already wanted it to be changed.

A review of The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization by Diana West. Political theory was uppermost at a recent AEI conference — it is, after all, a public-policy think tank. The question before the house: "Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?" An article on the paranoid style of movement conservatism. The man who has them nailed: Al Gore understands what a radical nihilist George W. Bush is. There Is No Political Center, There Are No Centrists: "Centrism" is the creation of an inaccurate self-serving metaphor which marginalizes the progressive cause, and it is time to bury it. Are today's progressives yesterday's liberals? Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg debate.