Reihan Goes Global

I try to avoid plugging things I write, but I’ve decided that this is silly. I am lame. I accept it. So I too will engage in self-promotion. E.g., hey fools! Buy the book I wrote with Ross! It’s sweet!

Wow, that practically took the life out of me. It’s the wee hours here is EST and I still need to watch A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and pack.

But I just had to mention that I have a piece in the new issue of The Spectator. As some of you know, I follow British politics pretty closely, and I’ve been reading The Spectator for years. It’s a real honor to appear in its pages. I’ve written a fairly harsh reality check for Republicans, one that implicitly calls for some degree of Cameronization of the GOP, and it touches on some themes I’ve addressed here. I make a few claims you might consider overbroad (among them that American exceptionalism is “all but dead”), but I think it holds up. See for yourself. And do give some thought to reading the rest of the issue. We have a lot to learn from our British counterparts, in journalism as in partisan politics. The Spectator is, without fail, free-wheeling and fun, and unfailingly intelligent about Labour’s travails — often in a sympathetic vein.

I also had the great pleasure of working with Jonathan Shainin, who is someone I’ve been hearing about for years, on a piece that just appeared in The National, a new newspaper) based in oil-rich Abu Dhabi. It’s a perhaps too-breezy recounting of the Clinton years in the broad sweep of contemporary history, and it posits that the defining element of the Clinton era was the positively Victorian self-confidence of America’s elite. I argue, briefly, that Obama represents what George W. Bush claimed to represent: a turn towards humility and a sense of limits, which is to say a more chastened American elite. I kind of hope that’s true.