From Allan Bloom’s lecture halls to the Iraq War’s intellectual wreckage, a memoir of how a neoconservative movement insider became a dissenter.
Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Posted inBooks
Tucker Carlson’s Long, Strange Trip
From bow-tied neocon to flannel-clad conspiracist, a once-talented writer becomes a promulgator of MAGA bilge.
Posted inBooks
God and Man at Sea
William F. Buckley Jr. spent a lifetime trying to make a coherent intellectual case for conservatism but could never articulate what it was supposed to consist of apart from owning the libs.
Posted inPolitics
With Vance Selection, Trump Doubles Down on America First
Besotted with authoritarians like Viktor Orban, the vice presidential pick is Trumpism personified and the heir to Charles Lindbergh, Pat Buchanan, and other GOP isolationists.
Posted inMagazine
How the Right’s Illiberal Past Became Present
A spate of new books reexamines the conservative movement’s history of worshipping authoritarians.
Posted inMagazine
Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Foreign Policy?
Trump served the interests of dictators. Biden boxed them in by strengthening the international liberal order.
Posted inMagazine
How Trump Survived January 6
After the insurrection, everyone was disavowing him. But thanks to his old buddy Steve Bannon and a coterie of strategists, Donald Trump regained dominance over the Republican Party.
Posted inJuly/August 2023
The Provocations of Martin Peretz
The legendary editor shook up the political-media power axis. Was he a free-thinking iconoclast or an irredeemable bigot?
Posted inMagazine
Birch of a Nation
How a group of conspiratorial far-right business tycoons in the 1950s and ‘60s helped lay the groundwork for the MAGA movement decades later.
Posted inBooks
The Courage and Compromises of George P. Shultz
When he died, at the age of 100, in 2021, George P. Shultz was widely hailed as a consummate pragmatist who represented a type of sober conservatism that has been almost entirely eradicated in the modern Republican Party. A charter member of the foreign policy establishment, he occupied four cabinet positions, including secretary of labor […]
