Suicide of the West, by Jonah Goldberg (464 pages, Crown Forum, 2018) Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West is truly Socratic, in the original sense of thinking through a fundamental problem and working arduously to a new understanding. It is a journey of mysterious discovery that any reader should find exhilarating. This wonderful book is [...]
At a minimum, a restoration of conservative thought requires paying attention to primitive history and to what it might tell us about the things that fusionism has long assumed are most important about tradition—as well as what this new knowledge reveals about the viability of freedom… Modern American conservatism rose in the 1950s under [...]
Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” is just what the philosophical doctor ordered to address the present disarray within the conservative intellectual movement: It is a prescription that requires going back to the very basics. Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen (Yale University Press, 2018) Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is just what the philosophical doctor [...]
One of the most important lessons of Mr. Trump’s electoral victory was that classically-liberal rhetoric and positions were not very important to voters. It turned out that they wanted a candidate who promised to help, not one who knew his Hayek… Six months of the Trump Administration have turned conservatives into Alices peering through the [...]
Does capitalism—in its need for efficient, low-paying, and universal labor—have a vested interest in family weakness?… Independent Institute Research Fellow Allan C. Carlson is probably America’s top intellectually-serious social conservative thinker, as he has demonstrated over the years as former President of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and author of books such as The [...]
Pretty much every thinking person on the Right is in therapy these days trying to break out of his ideological bubble and fit within the new world of Donald Trump. […]
Whether or not President Trump is successful with a principled nationalistic agenda or with a more pragmatic one, more traditionally-oriented conservative intellectuals must do some serious thinking, either acceding to nationalism or pragmatism or finding a new story… Donald Trump is nothing if he is not forthright. In his Inaugural Address, the President could not [...]