James Ceaser, perhaps our most distinguished student of American politics on the conservative side, isn’t about predicting the outcome of elections. That’s actually hard to do. And those political scientists who predict outcomes correctly well in advance are almost always just lucky. This election, all the evidence suggests, is going to be very close and [...]
So I’ve gotten a lot (meaning several) emails complaining that I haven’t gotten around to keeping my promise of talking about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Well, sorry. Here’s one reason why. I’m actually teaching that fascinating—and flawed—book right now, and I thought you’d learn more if I waited until after I [...]
I’ve been asked why I’ve stopped talking about movies. It’s not that I’ve stopped seeing them. The truth is that movies have gotten so much worse than the best of TV that they haven’t captured my full attention. I mean, of course, the excellent shows you can see—mainly but far from exclusively—on HBO. Let me pick [...]
So I don’t want to give the impression that heresies are all bad. They’re usually partly good: They highlight part of the truth that had been obscured or neglected. They’re rebellions that have a Christian point. Consider this partial affirmation of the heretical modern—or Lockean, nominalist–world by a very traditionalist and very erudite Catholic—Thaddeus Kozinski: [...]
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal education.” I’m going to sketch out the understanding of “liberal education” or “general education” shared by me and many of my fellow professorial conservatives (a tiny and shrinking [...]
So this astute and classy article by James Patterson explains why so many conservatives wrongly took the side of the Board of Visitors against University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan on the matter of her removal and reinstatement. Someone might say, though, that the conservatives who support the Board aren’t really conservatives. They’re more properly called [...]
The Greening of Conservative America, by John R. E. Bliese The first thing to say about this fine book is that it is much better than its misleading title. Professor John R. E. Bliese does not really argue that conservatives should join the Green Party or Greenpeace. While true conservatives have always been conservationists, their [...]
Today, Allan Bloom’s unlikely 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind is in some ways truer and more moving than ever. I have just taught the book in a class (one that began by reading Tocqueville) filled mostly with very smart yet still overachieving Evangelical students. They eagerly embraced the book as evidence of [...]