As we look forward to Christmas dinner with our families, you may be surprised to learn that someone else who always enjoyed his Christmas dinner claimed to be a vegetarian. That someone was the portly G. K. Chesterton. How could that be? After all, he was anything but a slim, trim fellow. And yet by [...]
Well before his death, Harry Jaffa saw the American regime gradually descending into a deadly brew of positivism, atheism, and nihilism. Given this “collapse of the soul” of American politics, Jaffa’s America was becoming increasingly alienated from both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Soul of Politics: Harry Jaffa and the Fight for [...]
Always a liberal and never a leftist, historian Richard Hofstadter’s over-arching theme in explaining twentieth-century America was what he termed “status anxiety,” which seems to be an effort to explain too much with too little. Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz (1047 [...]
“You Americans have no idea what you have here.” That line was spoken to me in heavily accented English roughly a half century ago. It hit me hard at the time, and it has popped into my head many times since. The speaker was a Czech immigrant, who also happened to be my landlord. A [...]
George Orwell was initially tempted to dismiss Charles Dickens because he seemed to have “no political program” to offer. But soon Orwell recognized this presumed defect to be a virtue and decided that Dickens was a moralist, not a revolutionary. Having recently celebrated the anniversary of our revolution of 1776, let’s remember the kind of [...]
Do those who seek a transformation of American society believe or disbelieve in American exceptionalism? We can assume that they do not love the country they seek to transform. After all, how can you love anything or anyone you deem to be in need of a fundamental transformation? Questions abound as the Biden Administration goes [...]
Given that parents everywhere during the pandemic have been forced to think—and re-think—the role and place of public education, this might well be the very moment to “re-imagine” the whole matter of the organization and delivery of such education, so as to elevate the status of parents among schooling decision-makers. As our public schools gradually [...]
Despite controlling neither the sword nor the purse, the Supreme Court has been able to wield considerable power by in effect legislating rather than simply judging. To lessen and perhaps gradually eliminate battles like “Roe v. Wade,” why not reduce the number of Supreme Court justices to five? During the 2020 campaign, which saw the [...]
The lava-like drift toward not just democracy but mass democracy might one day culminate in government by plebiscite. If that’s where American government is headed, we have all the more reason to turn in the opposite direction. And a good first step in that direction would be to repeal the 17th Amendment. Constitutional amendments are [...]
Into the breach—or onto the deserted ground—has marched a new metaphysics in the form of a new religion. In “The Madness of Crowds,” Douglas Murray explains this “religion” of identity politics. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray (304 pages, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021) A better title for this book might have [...]
We seem to be up to our ears in race-based policies and race-based thinking. As a result, we seem to be further away than ever from Martin Luther King’s goal of a color-blind society. If our government won’t behave as Dr. King hoped it would, maybe the answer is for each of us to act [...]
Not only was Francis Fukuyama wrong about China, but it’s beginning to appear that he was wrong about us as well. The obvious fact that China is not becoming more Madisonian is only half of the story. The other half is that the United States is threatening to become less Madisonian and much more like [...]
Today’s Democratic party is not the Democratic party of Al Smith or John Kennedy, but a secular institution with policy and program positions that fly in the face of Catholic teaching. And Joe Biden, also a Catholic Democrat, has simply drifted along with his party on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. “What the [...]
Today’s Democratic party is not the party of Joe Biden’s youth or middle age. As author Fred Siegel correctly observes, it is a top-bottom coalition of the well-credentialed (but not well-educated) upper-middle class and beyond, plus those who work for, depend upon, or otherwise presume to shelter under the benevolent arm of government. The Crisis [...]