then, however, the game was up for Britain. That very autumn, Harold MacMil- lan, the future prime minister, made his famous remark suggesting that Britain's role in the future would be to play Greece to America's Rome. That was not how Kip- ling had hoped things would turn out. But Hitchens suggests that "given the transmis- sion of British imperial notions to the Legates of the new Rome, he was not so quixotic a figure as Churchill's gesture makes him seem."
Subsidizing "Subsidies...
port-commissions, direct grants, and purchases for the national collection. In- deed, public subsidies for the arts remain far more generous than they are in the United States: $33 per capita annually, ver- sus 7 1 cents. Dutch art-often criticized as boring and repetitious-may not have im- proved since the abolition of the Arrange- ment, Tallman allows, but, in what seems a dubious defense, she says that the great- est defect of the Arrangement has been remedied: Art is no longer stored away i...
PERIODICALS
nesses of the French way were calami-tously revealed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France's overly central- ized system could not get troops to the front in time to stop the Prussians.
At various times during its history-no- tably during the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848-the Corps and all it stood for were endangered the brief ascendancy of politicians and ideas in the classical lib- eral mode of Adam Smith. Between the 1880s and World War 11, these ideas did p...
Mickey Kaus, in The New Republic (May 7, 1990), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036,
More and more Democrats these days seem to be resuming an old war cry: Soak the rich! Soak the rich!
Kaus, an editor of the New Republic, says that the chant sends shivers down his spine. Not because he is a Republican, not (presumably) because he is rich, but be- cause a revival of the politics of redistribu- tion, which he calls Money Liberalism, "would condemn the Democrats to a futile and often i...
Tom W. Smith, in Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 1990), Univ. Of Polling of Chicago Press, 5801 S. Ellis, Chicago, 111. 60637.
The origins of American political opinion polls are generally traced to 1936, when Alf Landon faced Franklin Roosevelt in one of the most lopsided "contests" in American history. Three pollsters (George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley) rose to the not-very-difficult task of predicting the winner. In fact, says Smith, a University of Chicago polling...
early October of 1824, the Star and North Carolina Gazette had collected poll results from 155 different meetings. Surprisingly, Smith says, the straw polls rather accurately foretold local results.
The ultimate irony is that popular opin- ion finally counted for little in 1824. Jack- son, the hero of New Orleans, won a plu- rality of the popular vote but fell short of a majority in the Electoral College. The elec- tion was decided the House of Repre- sentatives, which chose John Quincy Ad- ams...
early October of 1824, the Star and North Carolina Gazette had collected poll results from 155 different meetings. Surprisingly, Smith says, the straw polls rather accurately foretold local results.
The ultimate irony is that popular opin- ion finally counted for little in 1824. Jack- son, the hero of New Orleans, won a plu- rality of the popular vote but fell short of a majority in the Electoral College. The elec- tion was decided the House of Repre- sentatives, which chose John Quincy Ad- ams...
contrast, provided a framework in which unilateral Soviet ac- tions-even unilateral concessions- might make sense." Such concessions came quickly, beginning with Gorbachev's December 1988 announcement of troop cutbacks in Europe.
That is only one sign of the astonishing "minimalism" that Sestanovich sees sweeping Soviet foreign-policy thinking. Thus, Andrei Kozyrev, a top Foreign Minis- try official, wrote recently: "Our country has no interests justifying the use of mili- tary...
de-
mocratization. A natural
substitute for democracy
was nationalism, "that won-
drous 'political good' which
is never scarce and which
bestows psychic equality on
rich and poor, on masters
and servants alike." Fur-A U.S. cartoonist found the reunification of Germany a laughing
thermore, historical cir- matter. Few Europeans take the prospective marriage so lightly.
cumstances encouraged ex- treme nationalism.~he Second Reich (187 1-1 919) was a latecomer to the Great Powers an...
? "The Competitive Advantage of Nations" Michael E. Porter, in Harvard BusinessReview (March-April 1990), Boston, Mass.
"In a world of increasingly global compe- tition, nations have become more, not less important."
That's right, insists Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School, more impor-tant. Prevailing wisdom in corporate America tends toward the opposite con- clusion: Moving factories to countries with the lowest wages and interest rates, as well as strategic m...