Conservatives have long credited Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, a conflict that had occupied the world for decades. Liberals demand: Where is the proof? Fortunately for history and Reagan’s place in it, indisputable evidence of Reagan’s personal leadership has been supplied at last. . . . Lee Edwards reviews Reagan’s Secret War. [more]

Most of our contemporaries are highly critical of what they call “the unequal distribution of wealth.” As they see it, justice would require a state of affairs under which nobody enjoys what are to be considered superfluous luxuries as long as other people lack things necessary for the preservation of life, health, and cheerfulness. The ideal condition of mankind, they pretend, would be an equal distribution of all available consumer goods.... [more]

The twentieth century witnessed a decline of the American commitment to limited government and extensive private property rights. When the century began, our govern­ment still approximated a minimal state. We did not practice pure laissez faire, but we still placed severely binding restraints on government and al­lowed few intrusions of its potentially awesome power into the economic affairs of individual citizens. But government now suf­fuses every aspect of economic and social life. Merely to list its numerous powers would require a large volume: our farms and factories, our homes and schools, our health care, even our recreation—all feel its impact. . . . [more]

It is an occasional convention in conservative literature to talk about the “real split” in the world that animates contemporary political and cultural disagreements, a split deeper than the more pedestrian divide of Republicans versus Democrats. Russell Kirk liked to quote Eric Voegelin’s remark that the “great line of demarcation in modern politics...is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other.”... [more]