The modern Electoral College may not be exactly what the Founders intended, but it fits the spirit of their decentralized federal system. During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton remarked in Federalist 68 that the method of presidential selection was “almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which [...]
For this Christmas, I suggest you buy your Imaginative Conservative a sapling tree. That tree could be a blue spruce that might grow up to be, even more literally, a “Christmas tree” someday, but it can also be a shade tree or a tree that will produce nuts for wildlife or fruit for the family [...]
In this glorious season, I suggest you give the gift of a fine writing instrument. No imaginative conservative will be disappointed in receiving a new pen, which he can use to conserve the permanent things. As I reflected on our annual assignment of suggesting gifts for our imaginative conservative brothers and sisters, I struggled with [...]
Immediate popular majorities do not bestow greatness on statesmen. Rather, it is the longview of history and experience that will be the arbiters of the place each of our presidents will ultimately find. The office of the presidency has always been controversial. Born of the Founders’ struggle to create a stable republican political order, it [...]
Each of the nineteen essays in Present Concerns is packed with wisdom that can profitably be taken in little chunks over time and meditated upon over a steaming hot cup of tea or an even bigger pint of ale, perhaps even with a pipe pinched between one’s teeth, as Lewis surely would have it. Present [...]
Brewing one's own beer helps the conservative settle back into a habitual patience and a dedication to process and institutions that are assurances of good government in any republic... For the Christmas of 2016, I recommend you get the conservative in your life a homebrewing kit, such as the starter kit available from Northern Brewer. Now, before [...]
…[W]e can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe there was once something else, that something [...]
Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831. Though the French aristocrat came for only nine and a half months, his understanding of America and democratic peoples more broadly has never been matched. Most imaginative conservatives have probably read Tocqueville (and may well be some of the nation’s great experts) [...]
For the last week our televisions and newspapers have been taken up with commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As I write this, we are just an hour away from bells tolling across the land. It is right that we pause and remember the event that changed so [...]
It was a crisp fall evening when I met the storyteller for the first and only time. He was old, but probably not as old as he looked. Preoccupied with the few hairs he had left growing out from above his ears, he pushed the thin weeds back over his dome each time the wind [...]
Baseball is republican; baseball is deliberate; baseball is particularly American. May Little League baseball endure as long as the Republic it supports. Tonight one of the most important episodes in the life of the Gregg family came to an end. With Nolan (12) throwing a newly developed knuckle ball toward home plate, thirteen years of [...]
In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, C. S. Lewis referred to himself as a type of dinosaur; a species of “Old Western man” that was about to go extinct in the mid-20th century. Today I had the extraordinary opportunity to spend some time watching a man who I fear might also be one of the [...]
The parallels between the Mumford & Sons song “The Cave” and the Platonic story are impossible to miss. I am not someone who should ever review music, my tastes being without pattern when they exist at all. But, my students and an old friend have recently introduced me to a very intriguing band who released their second [...]
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to clear the bar to justify pushing some other unread book aside. I am very glad, however, that [...]