The Imaginative Conservative contains an embarrassment of riches in many ways. One of them is the offerings each year, from persons more sophisticated and morally rooted than I, of suggestions for appropriate Christmas gifts. But what of those of us who have friends who are not yet true, fully formed imaginative conservatives? Certainly, a gift [...]
Recently there has been a great deal of fond reminiscence (bordering on hagiography) of John F. Kennedy, sparked by recognition of the 50th anniversary of his assassination. That assassination was, of course, a horrible thing, for JFK, for his family, and for the nation. I would never say anything to minimize that fact. However, now [...]
More than twenty-five years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom pointed out that college students in the United States had become very “nice.” Students in general did not want to offend anyone and there was a constant concern to protect one another’s feelings. Bloom meant this as a half-hearted, even backhanded [...]
Orson Scott Card’s science fiction classic, Ender’s Game is defined by moral ambiguity. A book about children, it is no children’s book. In it, six-year-olds already find themselves in military schools, fighting for the chance to enter the off-planet Battle School where they will leave behind all thoughts of family and home for round-the-clock military [...]
Have you seen the internet ads? “Get Covered America” is literally popping up everywhere with its smiling faces, its semi-anonymous endorsements for Obamacare, and its offers to “help you on your journey to get covered.” At least there is some honesty, there. Far from a point and click process, let alone the semi-automatic process promised [...]
Bertrand de Jouvenel The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State. In the disaster for humanity that was the [...]
[A political party is] a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours, the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.– Edmund Burke All too many people in the mainstream press, and even among the Republican Party faithful, have been expressing extreme relief that Republican Party leaders “compromised” [...]
For decades, now, the universe of constitutional interpretation has been divided into “textualists,” who argue that the document must be read according to the reasonable meaning of its words, and those who argue for a “living” constitution, the meaning of which can “grow” over time to “meet the needs of a changing people and nation.” [...]
Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk It has been sixty years since The Conservative Mind burst onto the scene, garnering lengthy [...]
Senator Ted Cruz’s 2013 filibuster did not do much to change the dynamic of politics in Washington or to stop the Affordable Care Act from becoming the last brick in the wall of social democracy separating Americans from their traditions of self-reliance and local community control. But, to someone interested in the constitutional basis of such [...]
For more than a half century, now, we have heard that we have a “living” constitution. And it has always been difficult to argue with this position. After all, the opposite of a “living” constitution is a dead one. And who wants to be seen defending the dead hand of the past? Wouldn’t we all [...]
In “The Last Man,” Mary Shelley writes with a tone of sheer hopelessness, bordering on nihilism. Must romanticism despair when facing our limited existence? Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and paramour/wife to the poet Percy Shelley, wrote half a dozen novels during her lifetime, in addition to numerous essays and travelogues. The Last Man, the story [...]
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” These are not Thomas Jefferson’s most famous words, but they are quite famous among students of politics. They have been used for generations to justify radical political change. And, like the soaring rhetoric of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, these Jeffersonian words have gained him great [...]
I have been rereading Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterful Democracy in America. This book, written in the first half of the nineteenth century by a French aristocrat for his countrymen, remains standard reading for American college students and even some of their professors. In a way it is too bad that we tend to read it [...]