The concept of federalism has been one of the principal casualties of modern American history. One has to look far and wide to find American historians and political scientists who do not believe, with the smugness and tenacity of dogma, that our federal institutions are lumbering relics of a past we outgrew over a century [...]
My purpose is to set forth and explore the ramifications of two different conceptions or paradigms of American federalism whose roots can be traced to The Federalist essays of both Hamilton and Madison. Certain conclusions flow from this analysis that, in my judgment, are important to the conservative approach and thinking about centralization. Perhaps the [...]
The imaginative conservative champions certain first principles in response to the fragmenting forces of modernity. Burke articulated a humane order to counter the “armed doctrines” of French revolutionaries in the eighteenth century; in turn, Kirk opposed the galloping statism and rapacious totalitarianism of the twentieth. These avatars set down principles that are drawn from the [...]
My good friend, Bruce Frohnen, poses a question (“An isolated, but not Pacifist, query”) that I take the liberty to reformulate as follows: Aren’t the American people—whom I had held up as our best hope for putting an end to mindless imperialism (“Nisbet, War, and the American Republic”)—really to blame for the mess we are [...]
Winston does well in bringing Robert Nisbet’s teaching to bear upon the basic problems we confront (War, Crisis and Centralization of Power). An assigned reading in my contemporary American conservative course at Georgetown is Nisbet’s The Present Age. While this work incorporates much of his previous thought and findings, I assign it primarily because it is [...]