F. H. Buckley
Список книг автора F. H. BuckleyThe Way Back
The promise of America is that, with ambition and hard work, anyone can rise to the top. But now the promise has been broken, and we’ve become an aristocracy where rich parents raise rich kids and poor parents raise poor kids. We’ve been told that the changes are structural, that there’s nothing we can do about this. But that doesn’t explain why other First World countries are beating us hands down on the issue of mobility. What's different about America is our politics. An ostensibly progressive New Class of comfortably rich professionals, media leaders, and academics has shaped the contours of American politics and given us a country of fixed economic classes. It is supported by the poorest of Americans, who have little chance to rise, an alliance of both ends against the middle that recalls the Red Tories of parliamentary countries. Because they support an aristocracy, the members of the New Class are Tories, and because of their feigned concern for the poor, they are Red Tories.The Way Back explains the revolution in American politics, where political insurgents have challenged the complacent establishment of both parties, and shows how we can restore the promise of economic mobility and equality by pursuing socialist ends through capitalist means.
The Republic of Virtue
Public corruption is the silent killer of our economy. We’ve spawned the thickest network of patronage and influence ever seen in any country, a crony capitalism in which business partners with government and transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This is a betrayal of the Framers’ vision for America, and of the Constitution they saw as an anti-corruption covenant. Most Americans get it, and this explains the otherwise improbable rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. When a country is corrupt, legislative efforts to make things better can actually make them worse. That’s what has happened with our campaign finance laws, says the conservative, and not entirely without reason. We’ve criminalized political speech and sent the message that it’s unsafe to get involved in politics without a lawyer at one’s side. Donor disclosure requirements have also unleashed Internet mobs that attack political opponents. We’d be better off without any of them, Buckley argues in this provocative book. They’re a net with the curious feature that the big fish swim through safely while only the little fish are caught, and those with the wrong political beliefs. All such rules are a disaster, and should be replaced by a different set of laws that focus on crony capitalism and the nexus of legislators and lobbyists that prey on our economy.
The Once and Future King
This remarkable book shatters just about every myth surrounding American government, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, and offers the clearest warning about the alarming rise of one-man rule in the age of Obama.Most Americans believe that this country uniquely protects liberty, that it does so because of its Constitution, and that for this our thanks must go to the Founders, at their Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.F. H. Buckley’s book debunks all these myths. America isn’t the freest country around, according to the think tanks that study these things. And it’s not the Constitution that made it free, since parliamentary regimes are generally freer than presidential ones. Finally, what we think of as the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was not what the Founders had in mind. What they expected was a country in which Congress would dominate the government, and in which the president would play a much smaller role.Sadly, that’s not the government we have today. What we have instead is what Buckley calls Crown government: the rule of an all-powerful president. The country began in a revolt against one king, and today we see the dawn of a new kind of monarchy. What we have is what Founder George Mason called an “elective monarchy,” which he thought would be worse than the real thing.Much of this is irreversible. Constitutional amendments to redress the balance of power are extremely unlikely, and most Americans seem to have accepted, and even welcomed, Crown government. The way back lies through Congress, and Buckley suggests feasible reforms that it might adopt, to regain the authority and respect it has squandered.