Ronald Reagan never wavered in his conviction that America was a great country that would prevail over enemies of democracy and freedom. His fundamental optimism and determination carried his nation to victory over the Soviet “evil empire” and his personal rags-to-riches experience breathed new life into the venerable American dream of limited government, personal liberty, and individual self-reliance. Sadly, Reagan’s current successor governs on the premise that America is no longer great, and he has no discernible, consistent convictions about anything. Mark Milke laments the loss of U.S. self-confidence, and leadership, in a review of a new book about the “Great Communicator”.

One of the sillier narratives competing for traction in the Alberta election is that Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are modern incarnations of, respectively, Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein. This ignores the fact that Alberta boomed under Lougheed and has been a bust under Notley, and that Kenney is a philosophical conservative while Klein was flexible populist. Paul Stanway sorted much of this out in his review of Mark Milke’s timely book Ralph vs Rachel.

What does it mean to be living in a so-called “age of disruption”? Barry Cooper, reviewing Stephen Harper’s Right Here, Right Now: Political Leadership in the Age of Disruption, argues that our current disruption arises from the collapse of the USSR and the ensuing extinguishment of the ideals of the French Revolution. Harper’s recognition of this, argues Cooper, is evidence of “inspired political understanding.”