RealClearBooks Articles
Rage and the Republic by Jonathan Turley
On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, law professor, legal analyst, and bestselling author of The Indispensable Right Jonathan Turley explores how the unique origins of American democracy set it apart from other revolutions, whether it can survive and thrive in the 21st century, and how the unfinished story of the revolution will play out in a rapidly changing world.This is a book about revolutions. Most countries are the progeny of revolution. At the birth of this nation, the Founding Fathers faced the quintessential question of self-governance: how do you keep...
The Panic
Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan shares little beside its title and first-person perspective with the nineteenth-century Norwegian novella by Knut Hamsun about the erotic yearnings and pantheistic visions of a hunter who carries an effigy of the titular god on his cartridge case. Clune’s boldness consists in being altogether more literal. At the novel’s core is a metaphysical vision, which it presents fully, persuasively, and in detail, without metaphorical evasion or (once its hero forsakes the tender mercies of contemporary medicine and psychiatry) rationalizing...
What Robert Kraft Gets Right
There is a lot to criticize about the widely mocked Blue Square Alliance Super Bowl ad. In it, two bullies knock into David, a Jewish boy, and attach to his backpack a yellow sticky note with the words “dirty Jew.” A taller boy with a deeper voice puts a blue sticky note on top of the yellow one, telling David, “Do not listen to that,” and “I know how it feels.”
David’s savior is Bilal, a Black student with a Muslim Arab name, who stops David from directly addressing the antisemites. After covering the antisemitic note with his blank blue one, with no...
Two New Books Bash Covid Failures
I find failure fascinating. My first scholarly articles explored well-meaning Army General William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War disaster. I never thought I’d see that happen again. Then came Covid.
Winter 2019-20 brought trouble. A deadly virus hit China, then Italy, then all over. After initially counseling against large-scale lockdowns, masks, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions which had underperformed in past pandemics, public health bureaucracies imposed them with gusto, copying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and denouncing dissidents as “anti-science.” In...
Why Scientists, Scholars, and Experts Are Not—and Cannot Be—Neutral Authorities
Excerpted from Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy (Creed & Culture), published on February 3, 2026.
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“Through the aid of applied science we shall rise from partisanship into patriotism.” — David Starr Jordan, The Call of the Nation (1910)
In 1927, Julian Benda published a book provocatively titled The Treason of the Intellectuals, arguing that although in former days, most of the intellectual class stood apart from political passions, today they plunge into them, scorning the attitude of critical suspension from...
Why America Must Not Turn into Southern Italy
When it comes to functioning democracies, trust is an integral ingredient; without it, communities cannot function, and citizens grow increasingly despondent and hopeless.
In 2026, America is celebrating its semiquincentennial. We have much to be proud of, including our rich, Tocquevillian tradition of forming civic associations and voluntary groups. Our ability, in other words, to come together – regardless of gender, class, or race – in pursuit of shared goals is unparalleled.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “The English often perform great things...
“Human, All Too Human”: The Descent into World War I
Excerpted from The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe (Creed & Culture), published on January 20, 2026.
For three reasons, over the years 1890 to 1914 the great powers of Europe gradually lost their ability to manage the spread of rival nationalisms in the Balkans. The first reason was a radical shift in German foreign policy. The second was a new alliance system that arose in opposition to Germany’s Triple Alliance. And the third was a shocking new specter in international politics: state-sponsored terrorism.
In 1888 both Kaiser Wilhelm I and his...
The Higher Plane
Rosalia is a young Spanish popstar, but if you’re American like me, you probably had no idea who she was until a couple months ago. To me, the new generation of Latin musicians — rappers like Bad Bunny, R&B crooners like Maluma, and sex-pot bombshells like Karol G — all converged in the rootless, over-produced cacophony of any other globalized pop. Yet Rosalia is something different entirely.
Her new album LUX, released in November, not only carries the civilizational torch of Western culture, but actually moves it forward. In both style and substance, this operatic...
Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress & Their Hunter
Shortly before 11:00 p.m, 24-year old heiress Leila Welsh and her boyfriend Richard Funk stepped into Kansas City’s swinging Hotel Phillips. They walked across the palatial lobby into the Tropics Room, a tiki bar fitted with sounds of thunder, flickering lights, paper-mache palm trees, and a rainstorm behind the bar. Richard sipped on his usual rum collins and Leila on her usual Coca-Cola. Just two miles away, Leila’s mother Marie Welsh awoke from her half slumber. She checked the clock. Leila should have been home by now. The moon was dim, and the darkness outside looked...
Hamilton, Jefferson, and the American Idea
The battle between the power of government and individual liberty has been the enduring struggle throughout American history. When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he had in mind three principles for these United States of America: liberty, equality, and government by consent. These formed what we might call the “American Idea,” which was enshrined in the new written state constitutions adopted throughout the late 1770s and 1780s. During the fierce ratification battle over the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton penned his own explanation as to how...
Age of Elkin
Time was, Stanley Elkin was a go-to for the MFA crowd. I recall the titles of his works rolling off many a young writer’s reverent tongue back in the 1990s and 2000s. Even if you hadn’t read him, which I had not, his reputation preceded him in such a way that you never quite forgot that funny, old-timey name—four trochaic syllables like a sorcerer’s utterance invoking the spirit of a minor American god. You were told he was both comic and ingenious, irreverent and formidable. You did not suspect he was postmodern until someone told you that he hung out with Gaddis,...
The Last Supper: New York’s Socialist Feast
Tuesday, 4 November 2025
Edison bulbs hung low over the reclaimed-wood table at a popular Brooklyn hangout. A chalkboard listed the Yuletide Farm-to-Table Specials: Roast Chicken with Rosemary ($31), Charred Brussels Sprouts ($14), Winter Ale Braise ($29). Twelve people in Christmas sweaters were packed along the benches. One wore a green turtleneck printed with Santas in yoga poses — a limited-release Ralph Lauren that had sold out at $178.
This was the brunch wing of the socialist revolution.
Above the bar, the television was tuned to NY1. At 11:17 p.m., the banner changed:...
Can a Brooklyn Open Mic be the Answer to Loneliness?
Combating our current scourge of loneliness and social isolation must be seen as a societal imperative. Platitudes about togetherness won’t do; we need action items.
A new survey published by the American Psychological Association unfortunately doesn’t inspire optimism:
“Half of adults in the U.S. reported feelings of emotional disconnection, saying they have felt isolated from others (54%), felt left out (50%), or have lacked companionship (50%) often or some of the time, suggesting loneliness may have become a defining feature of life in...
Lincoln’s Happiest Day: His Final Hours Before the Play
Good Friday, April 14, 1865
The president eased his six-foot-four frame out of bed so as not to wake his wife and stepped into a morning that felt, for the first time in years, curiously like joy. A long time ago she asked him to call her Molly. As if a softer name than Mary Todd might cover the moods that visited without warning. He tried to be her helpmate — frontier hands, bookish mind, a soft voice that carried hard truths when necessary — but consolation wasn’t her remedy. Nineteenth-century doctors called it “nervousness.” Today we would call it...
The Rule Breaker: Anna Freud
“Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours.”
— Anna Freud
Picture early morning in Vienna’s Berggasse 19. Sigmund Freud lights a cigar, pours black coffee, and settles in with Anna beside him. She is composed and attentive. Strangers might conclude she is his assistant. Maybe a patient. Perhaps a family member stopping by to say hello. All true. But what the casual observer misses is a deeper story. This is not a typical father–daughter bond. They are...
Princeton President (Sort Of) Supports Free Speech
You know you are winning when powerful people become hypocrites to claim they agree with you. That’s how free speech advocates should view Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. Eisgruber, a gifted attorney, leads elite opposition to higher education reform. He personifies the establishment, as one might say back in the day--The Man. Eisgruber’s book displays the mindset of leaders who realize they can no longer use raw power to enforce compliance and must instead negotiate with the normies. As Ronald Reagan said of...
Writer's Diary by Matthew Gasda
"I guess my fantasy has always been that things can be reasonable, that life can be arranged in sensible, pleasant ways. But it can’t; I always underestimate the destructive element in human nature…"
Aphorisms, meditations, and provocations on New York's independent theater scene, artmaking in the age of artificial intelligence, devotion versus doom scrolling, and the usefulness of heartbreak. Matthew Gasda argues that we invent the self by way of documenting the self—and in Writer's Diary, we see Gasda's sense of disconnection from culture paired with a relentless...
History Still Matters, and So Does David McCullough
Author and historian David McCullough left a massive void behind in his absence when he died in 2022. Fortunately, many close to him agreed that his wisdom and insights were still needed today. In September, Simon & Schuster published History Matters, a posthumous book that consisted of a collection of McCullough’s speeches, essays, interviews, and lists — some of which were previously unreleased. It was compiled by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his research partner, Michael Hill.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact that David McCullough had throughout...
The Grand Valley
18. We get a little abstract and we make up a bunch of words and phrases in order to describe what Joan Mitchell was doing on the canvases she painted in 1964, a kind of annus mirabilis for Joan Mitchell in which she obliterated herself and therefore also became most herself.
BEFORE JOAN MITCHELL moved out to Monet’s part of France, before Jean-Paul Riopelle ran off with the dog-walker and while she was still in the heyday of her greatest period of artistic ferment, around 1964, she painted a number of canvases that are mostly just centers. I love these paintings so much that I...
Marlon Brando's Delusional Greatness
Marlon Brando was a great man: a genius, a visionary, a generational talent, and perhaps the best actor to ever live. Few would disagree, claiming it self-evident. But the latest biopic on Brando’s turbulent life can’t seem to decide either way.
Waltzing with Brando was a years-long passion project for Billy Zane, a prolific actor in his own right, who both produced the film and starred as Brando. Yet rather than focus on Brando’s acting career, or even his litany of scandals and controversies, the film zeroes in on his fanatical pursuit to build a utopian resort on his...
