Another sign of the politicization of all aspects of our culture is the latest Criterion Channel tagline for the 1951 film High Noon: “One of the most politically resonant of all Hollywood westerns.” Really? They’re referencing, of course, the screenwriter Carl Foreman’s brief membership in the Communist Party, which eventually landed him on the industry’s blacklist. Fans of the film need not worry, however: This doesn’t mean playing Tex Ritter’s rendition of the film’s theme song “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling” backwards yields “The Internationale” communist anthem.

The Gary Cooper oater has received a political makeover by Glenn Frankel in a book that once again covers the story of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigations into Tinsel Town communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. No matter whether readers believe that HUAC and the Hollywood studio blacklists it prompted abrogated constitutionally protected free speech and free association (true – to an extent) or agree that subversive activities were commonplace within the movie industry (also true – to an extent), this book (High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, Bloomsbury USA) does little to sway...

When Tzvetan Todorov died on February 7, the Bulgarian/French philosopher and literary critic was lamented only in certain intellectual ghettoes. To the men and women eulogizing Todorov in these circles, he was feted properly if not stingily, which is most unfortunate. Finite word counts are a harsh mistress when a fellow writer endeavors to create a fully realized portrait of his or her subject.

Todorov leaves behind a body of historical and moral philosophy that connects the dots between the great European humanist writers prior to the Marxist experiments of the twentieth century – Comte, Montaigne, Montesquieu, for example – and such documentarians of Nazi and Soviet evils as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Unlike the listed documentarians, Todorov never suffered the deprivations of the Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps. He did, however, endure the suppression of individual freedom until he was 24 years old, the age he emigrated from Soviet-satellite Bulgaria to France more than 50 years ago.

Why then should we celebrate Todorov’s accomplishments? What distinguishes Todorov’s works on the totalitarian experiments of the past 100 years is his focus on the moral witness by those denied fundamental dignities in the Soviet camps and German...

Former Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson announced his support this week for a 28^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would overturn Citizens United. According to Simpson, the version of the 28^th Amendment he backs would set “reasonable limits on election spending, reform pay-to-play politics, and secure human liberty and equal representation rather than turn our government over to a global corporate marketplace.”

It was in 2010 that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decided Citizens United by a 5-4 vote. The decision overturned most campaign finance provisions of the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act. Kimberley Strassel, in her 2016 book The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, depicts Sen. John McCain’s co-sponsorship of the bill as the Arizona Republican’s public penance for his political embarrassment as one of five senators snared in the Savings and Loan corruption imbroglio. As one of the “Keating Five,” McCain was accused of improper intervention on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association in 1987.

Rather than admit personal responsibility for his ethical misstep, surmises Strassel, McCain blamed a system he attempted to remedy with unwieldy campaign finance regulations. President George W. Bush, a...

The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall and subsequent disintegration of the USSR in the 1990s was cause for celebration throughout the world. Finally, the Cold War was ended – or so most of us believed – and the so-called “peace dividend” would result in introducing democratic liberties to countries formerly subjected to the totalitarian fist.

During the ensuing quarter century, however, it’s been a mixed bag. It’s true that global poverty has fallen admirably by roughly 50 percent during this period, and living standards have increased proportionally the world over due to increased economic and political freedoms. The authoritarian urge only swims temporarily beneath the surface, however, and repeatedly reasserts its will to power. Socialism didn’t work in the past, we’re told, because communism wasn’t the right brand of socialism. The progressive culture busily set itself to rebranding efforts at a slower pace, unshackled from the deadlines of Five Year Plans and such, while aided and abetted by the game plan outlined by Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals.

Consider: An avowed socialist candidate came close to clinching the presidential nomination in what was once considered the world’s greatest proponent of liberty; the same country is hobbled...