How long are we going to tolerate senators and congressmen who divulge our most closely-held secrets to the public in search of cheap political gain? We have laws that make those leaks serious federal crimes. We're spending enormous resources on finding out who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the press. Leaks that are vastly more important -- and which should be pursued with no less determination and resources -- are regularly ignored because the culprits are sitting members of Congress. These leakers should be thrown out of office and prosecuted.

It's been about two years since Sen. Richard Shelby blew one of our most important secrets -- that we were bugging Osama bin Laden's cell phone, a fact that could have led to the capture of America's most wanted terrorist -- by bragging about it to a reporter. [. . . . ]

If the laws that require our secrets be kept secret aren't taken seriously by those who hold the public's trust -- such as Shelby and the "Misty Three" -- and if serious violations of these laws are also taken lightly as Sen. Frist seems to be doing now -- our system of government will not be able to function as the Constitution says it must. If Congress cannot be trusted with secrets such as these, it cannot provide the essential checks and balances on the Executive we rely on it to perform in order to protect us from a runaway president. Right now, we apparently have a runaway Senate. The Justice Department, and Sen. Frist's office, should be working day and night until this problem is solved, and cooperate to ensure the leakers are punished to the full extent of the law.

Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself. [. . . . ]

Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to. For the most part, it isn't bad commentary. If the broadsheets were badly written, if the sermonisers and pundits couldn't speak in coherent sentences, if you routinely turned the radio on to hear people not making any sense, it would all be much easier to dismiss. That, though, is not the problem with what passes for intellectual and political life in Britain. The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms. The void gapes at its widest when there is a conspicuous attempt at pretending to fill it: the frowning politico miming thought as he makes a 'big' speech to set out policy; the extensively press-released think-tank paper whose main purpose is to draw attention to itself; the utterly formulaic broadcast debate. You witness these performances (which is what they are) and you think: I wish somebody would say something. Because this is the feeling you get about British public life, a bizarre feeling given how astonishingly much talk there is, but one which even so goes very deep: you get the feeling that nobody ever says anything. You watch the television, read the paper, and wait for somebody to say something . . . and wait . . . and wait . . .

It is in this context that Ferdinand Mount's book Mind the Gap is so welcome. He has written an essay about class in which it is possible to disagree with almost every assertion and produce counter-examples for almost every fact, but which gives the strange, giddy-making sensation that there is a source of oxygen somewhere in the room. This is in considerable part because Mount is writing about a real subject - and one of the ways one can tell it is a real subject is from the general reluctance to discuss it in public. His brilliant but depressing book offers an analysis of the ways the working class has been consistently denigrated, disempowered, and 'subjected to a sustained programme of social contempt and institutional erosion which has persisted through many different governments and several political fashions'. This has caused a 'kind of cultural impoverishment', accompanied by a 'hollowing out' of what Mount unflinchingly calls 'lower-class' life, leading to 'the sense that the worst-off in this country live impoverished lives, more so than the worst-off on the Continent or in the United States'. [. . . . ]