Joel Mathis

My friend Steve Hayward is put out with The Chronicle of Higher Education for not including non-white-guy voices in its recent “Trump 101” syllabus: Where to begin. First, let’s note that Trump has caught on precisely because he speaks to “marginalized groups” that the fashionable, race-obsessed academic left (and much of the GOP establishment—ahem) disdains. So the identity politics set gets a failing grade here for low self-awareness. Second, it is embarrassing but necessary to point out that when inquiring about any subject, any serious list will want to include only the best work that bears on the subject. When Ta Nahesi Coates writes something sensible about Trump, someone will include it on a recommended reading list. So let’s talk about the “identity politics” involved here.

One reason I've never really come around to being a small-government conservative is my belief that if we put a tight leash on the feds, that will allow other large institutions--mostly big businesses, but not limited to that-- to dominate me instead . Conservatives deploy the language of liberty pretty effectively, but often it's in the service of a corporatist agenda that would wouldn't necessarily feel "free" to most of us. I'm not so much sure that "big government" is as much of a problem as is bigness itself: Outsized institutions of any sort, public or private, can have outsized impacts on our lives. So I'm intrigued by the question raised by my friend (and occasional nemesis) Steve Hayward over at Power Line. If conservatives want small government, he asks, should they also be in favor of breaking up the big banks?  So I think I could be persuaded that the big banks should be broken up, though this requires conservatives and pro-market

So I've finished Peter Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris." It's part of a series of books that have been released in the last year or so -- many of which I've read (this, apparently, being the year George Kennan ) -- examining American foreign policy in the 20th century. Some of those books have merely had the goal of appraising the Cold War now that it is firmly in history's mirror; others, like Beinart's, are looking back to see what lessons we might learn to apply in the aftermath of America's post-9/11 irrational exuberance for foreign adventurism. If I could construct my takeaway from all these books -- including Beinart's -- I'd come up with something like this: * It's insanity for America to think it can be the world's dominant power. A superpower, yes, and perhaps the most powerful one. But the only one? No. We can't afford it. And other nations -- particularly, at this moment, China --