Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Virginia would become something other than what most Americans tend to think of in relation to localist democracy. But Jamestown, after much painful experimentation, had established the kinds of local institutions, beliefs, and practices that colonizers recognized as the prerequisites to successful settlement and that we [...]
Though it has been obvious to discerning observers for a considerable period that the United States is moving at an accelerating pace from constitutionalism toward arbitrary power, the vast majority of Americans have been slow to recognize that a crisis of governance exists. Much of the reason, I think, is that entire structures of understanding [...]
Anyone harboring concerns over the state of British culture should have had their fears laid to rest by the London Olympics’ opening ceremonies. British culture is well and truly dead. From the “signing” choir that could hardly sing, to the parade of “notable” left-wing figures carrying the flag around the stadium, the mish-mash of bad [...]
John Adams was a true statesman, committed to republican principles, conducting himself in a virtuous manner that served the public good. Without him, it is entirely possible that there would be no United States of America. What kind of person is worthy of being called a “statesman”? What type of character, what accomplishments, what life [...]
It is official. Obamacare is Constitutional. And we all know why: because Chief Justice Roberts says the individual mandate is not actually a mandate, it is a tax. The critical passage from the opinion nicely sums up Roberts’ decree: “The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause [...]
Karen Klein, the grandmother/bus monitor whose bullying by a group of middle school students was captured on video and posted online, has become a bit of a celebrity over the summer of 2012. I have nothing but respect for this eminently decent woman. But the story of her ordeal has followed an all-too-common trajectory in [...]
T.S. Eliot T. S. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.[1] Eliot is almost as well known among literate persons as a critic and literary theorist. His journal, The Criterion, despite its short lifespan, remains the standard of high modernism. Continuing interest in [...]
The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution, by Paul Horwitz Any attempt at fairness in evaluating The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution must start by recognizing the light touch and good will Paul Horwitz brings to a topic fraught with ponderous and cryptic argumentation, punctuated by outright acrimony. If the book fails [...]
By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend [...]
By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend [...]
Patrick Deneen, over at Front Porch Republic, has posted reflections on what he deems the lack of a conservative tradition in America (find it here). My first instinct, on being shown the piece by Winston Elliott, was that its errors were too numerous and thoroughgoing to address, and that to do so might seem churlish, especially [...]
In reviewing materials for a course I teach on the origins of the American Constitution, I ran across the following from the (1641) Massachusetts Body of Liberties (spelling modernized): No man shall be compelled to go out of the limits of this plantation upon any offensive wars which this Commonwealth or any of our friends [...]
George Carey Liberty Fund has released a DVD starring none other than our own George Carey. A CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE W. CAREY features telling insights on the nature of our constitutional order, the breakdown of the separation of powers, the decline of political science as a profession, and the prospects for constitutional morality in our [...]
One of the more commonly debated passages from the Bible concerns Jesus’ response to criticism of a woman for anointing him with expensive oil. The woman was criticized on the grounds that the oil should have been sold to help the poor. Jesus, of course, responded “The poor you will always have with you.” Many [...]