John Derbyshire reviews Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin — Derbyshire says that while he does not hold any obvious malice, Robin is operating under false pretenses about conservatism. Meanwhile, at The New Inquiry, Robin engages in a debate with TAC‘s Daniel Larison.

John Payne pays a visit to Occupy Wall Street to get a sense of the movement’s direction. While many of his prejudices about the participants were confirmed upon initial observation, deeper inspection revealed a lot of ordinary Americans, who like the Tea Party, are unable come to terms with American decline.

It could be that the diffuse, non-specific, ineffective OWS demonstrations are, in fact, particularly expressive of the Zeitgeist. People are upset, but they don’t really know what they’d like to see happen, and they don’t have any leaders around which to rally.

W. James Antle III took a trip to Harvard Law School for “ConConCon” — a conference on a hypothetical constitutional convention.

Article V of the Constitution outlines two ways with which it can be amended. The first — which Americans are most familiar with — is through approval by two-thirds of both houses Congress and subsequent ratification by 75% of the states. The second way to start the amendment process is by constitutional convention, to be called if legislatures of two-thirds of the states request it.

Esoteric as this may seem, it’s not a purely academic concern. Conservatives and libertarians have occasionally dusted off this oft-ignored provision of Article V as a possible way of reasserting constitutional limits on the federal government. Congress may not be eager to advance amendments that curb its own power, but an Article V convention called by the state legislatures should have no such compunctions.

Lewis McCrary reports on developments at the realist foreign policy journal The National Interest, where veteran DC journalist Robert Merry took the editorial reins in September.

Steven Pinker explores the decline of violence in the modern world in The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Steve Sailer offers an engaging review.

Patrick J. Buchanan says that the conquest of the West has begun by way of demographic change throughout the globe. Western mortality rates are greatly outpacing birth rates. Meanwhile, in other regions of the world, populations are exploding:

What is the future of Europe? What is the future of Western man? Houari Boumedienne, Algerian revolutionary and president of his country, predicted it at the United Nations in 1975.

“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere of this planet to burst into the Northern one. But not as friends. Because they will come in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”

Rod Dreher takes a look at a unique participant of the Occupy Wall Street movement — a protestor who is can’t find work despite his Master’s degree… in puppetry.