The Public Interest articles from March 1998

The Public Interest archives from March 1998

Democratic remedies for democratic disorders.
March 22, 1998... A famous passage in the Federalist Papers calls for "a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government." The diseases the Founding Fathers had in mind were those associated with factions: the pursuit of special interests...

Human remedies for social disorders.
March 22, 1998... We live in a nation confident of its wealth and proud of its power, yet convinced that this wealth cannot prevent, and this power cannot touch, a profound corrosion of our cultural soul. We are materially better off than our parents but...

Body and soul: the musical miseducation of the youth.
March 22, 1998... For my title, I borrow the name of a song written by Johnny Green and most fatuously recorded by Coleman Hawkins in 1939. That recording was a success on the charts, in dance halls, and on radio. It was also, in the view of most intellectuals,...

Killing off the dying? (so-called assisted suicide)
March 22, 1998... Americans seem ready to embrace something extraordinary: a practice called assisted death whereby a physician helps an ailing patient kill himself. "Kill" is a harsh word, and advocates understandably use it rarely. They prefer "death control,"...

Moral reform - learning from the past.
March 22, 1998... A hallmark of contemporary conservative thought is that poverty can be reduced most effectively or even only through character training and the creation of moral communities. Thus it is argued that poverty will be lessened only to the extent that...

The new pork barrel.
March 22, 1998... A little more than 20 years have passed since David Stockman's famous essay, "The Social Pork Barrel," appeared in The Public Interest.(1) For most of those years, Stockman's description of how the federal government spent our money remained...

Teaching the young.
March 22, 1998... In English 102," a recent graduate of the University of Nevada at Reno reports, "we had to write a letter putting ourselves in the shoes of a gay person, like breaking the news to our parents saying we were gay, and explaining our lifestyle to...

Cultivating Humanity.
March 22, 1998... In English 102," a recent graduate of the University of Nevada at Reno reports, "we had to write a letter putting ourselves in the shoes of a gay person, like breaking the news to our parents saying we were gay, and explaining our lifestyle to...

Patriotic political science.
March 22, 1998... America was "founded on a rejection of Eurocentrism." So says political scientist James W. Ceaser, and he offers the following prooftext, from the Federalist Papers: The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four...

Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought.
March 22, 1998... America was "founded on a rejection of Eurocentrism." So says political scientist James W. Ceaser, and he offers the following prooftext, from the Federalist Papers: The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four...

Elective citizenship?
March 22, 1998... We often think of the United States as a country founded on universal principles of individual rights - on "unalienable rights endowed by [our] Creator," in the familiar phrase of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration actually begins...

Civic Ideals.
March 22, 1998... We often think of the United States as a country founded on universal principles of individual rights - on "unalienable rights endowed by [our] Creator," in the familiar phrase of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration actually begins...

Reagan versus the intellectuals. (former US Pres Ronald Reagan)
March 22, 1998... As Samuel Johnson once remarked, we more often need to be reminded than to be instructed. That pithy observation helps us take the proper measure of Dinesh D'Souza's newest book, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary...

Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
March 22, 1998... As Samuel Johnson once remarked, we more often need to be reminded than to be instructed. That pithy observation helps us take the proper measure of Dinesh D'Souza's newest book, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary...