Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

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Paul Rahe On The Conservative Prospect

Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, by Paul A. Rahe, is a book that will NLT readers will enjoy and learn from. I reviewed the book last month for National Review, and Mark Steyn wrote about it for The New Criterion. Prof. Rahe, a historian at Hillsdale College, has been contributing essays to Power Line over the past few weeks, the most recent of which explored some of the questions raised in these two reviews. The fellows who run Power Line were kind enough to let me respond to Prof. Rahe, in a post that appeared yesterday.

Discussions - 1 Comment

Vogeli's and Rahe's dialogue is an important one...more on Powerline.

I'm a Tocqueville scholar, and I'm in the process of finishing a review of Rahe's book for an academic publication. The main thing I'd say to the NLT crowd is, er, uh...the middle parts of the book might put you to sleep. Buy the book, read the introduction, and then skip forward to the specific section on Toc's theory of soft despotism, and then read the last two chapters and the conclusion, which vividly describe how contemporary democracies are becomming softly despotic. Every citizen should read these chapters, and they are accessible, but the rest of the book will weary general readers.

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