Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: PROGRESSIVISM ANDTHE LIBERAL CENTURY -- Taming Big Government -- A Nicer Form of Tyranny -- Why the Election of 1912 Changed America -- FDR as Statesman -- The Endless Party -- Involuntary Associations -- A Left-Handed Salute -- Flights of Fancy -- Part II. RENEWING CONSERVATISM -- The Conservative Challenge -- The Right Stuff -- Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement -- The Myth of the Racist Republicans -- The Long Detour -- Why Conservatives Lost the War of Ideas -- The Conservative Cocoon -- Tailgunner Ann -- Part III. THE WAR WE ARE IN -- Victory: What It Will Take to Win -- War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity -- Leo Strauss and American Foreign Policy -- Democracy and the Bush Doctrine -- Tribes of Terror -- The Home Front: Left, Right, and (Elusive) Center -- Theater of War -- Why We Don't Win -- Intermezzo: A Portfolio of Illustrations from the Claremont Review of Books -- Part IV. STATESMEN AND DESPOTS -- Aristotle and Locke in the American Founding -- Moral Monster -- The Man Who Made Modern America -- Three-Fifths Historian -- How the Confederates Won -- The Bicentennial Lincolns -- Tyranny and Utopia -- Thoughts and Adventures -- The Greatness and Decline of American Oratory -- Part V. CURRENT CONTENTIONS -- Business as Usual -- The Presidential Nomination Mess -- Continental Drift -- France's Immigrant Problem-and Ours -- Free to Use -- All the Leaves Are Brown -- Is Health Care a Right? -- Part VI. HEARTS AND MINDS -- Born American, But in the Wrong Place -- The Crisis of American National Identity -- The Debacle at Harvard -- The Education Mill -- Wimps and Barbarians -- Against the Virtual Life -- A Dance to the (Disco) Music of Time -- The Three Rings -- Part VII. ARTS, LITERATURE, AND LEISURE -- Building Democracy -- Pith and Pen -- Man of Letters.

Larry McMurtry and the American West -- The Genius of Old New York -- Aryan Sister -- Is There Intelligent Life on Television? -- Music, Philosophy, and Generation Y -- Macbeth and the Moral Universe -- Index -- List of Contributors -- List of Books Reviewed and Discussed*.