Yes, I know: The New Criterion has for years been edited by Hilton Kramer, who the hip folk think is a crank. Well, why shouldn't he be cranky? Is the state of our culture so rich and deep that serious editors, writers and thinkers generally should be, well, complacent and cheery? It, of course, is not. And neither is our politics, by which I don't mean how and on whom taxes are levied or whether single payer health insurance would mean an advance or decline of medical care or whether there is some hope or just desperation in the ongoing American presence in Iraq. I don't mean any of this. What The New Criterion has often done is to bring the argument back to first principles and first definitions. In a symposium entitled "The Nation State Today," four essayists (Roger Kimball, Daniel Johnson, Keith Windschuttle and Andrew C. McCarthy) confront the ironies of the modern political system. The most important are these: 1. After a century of tying political legitimacy to nation-states based on what we thought would be coherent and cohesive peoples, many countries, (and especially third-world countries for which there had been such wild hopes) find themselves coercing divided populations into an artificial and often cruel sovereignty. How many of these states are now fighting wars against their own populations? 2. Given that modern legitimacy derives neither from God nor from sheer power but from democratic norms, its absence from the authority of governments (and these governments' contempt for these norms) makes them simply illegitimate. They have no claim to legitimacy, and in that sense they should have no claim to representation in international institutions. 3. So the claims that the international order (the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the U.N. Human Rights Council) expresses the "democratic will" of all nations and of the world is simply false and cruelly false, at that. Indeed, international authority is no democratic authority at all. 4. It is ironic that it is progressives who now stand up for reactionary ideas and these reactionary institutions, making them the arbiters of international justice. Please read these elegantly argued pieces, which you can do by clicking here.