Though secession is unlikely, a secession of the heart has already taken place in America. We are two nations, two peoples seemingly separated indefinitely. Can a nation so divided as ours, racially, ideologically, religiously, still do great things together, as did the America of days gone by, to the amazement of the world? When the [...]
The neighbourhood can give one a greater sense of a geographic and social whole. It can serve as a bridge between the home and the larger society. The limited control we have over who our neighbours are reflects the normal conditions of a large society. How well do you know your neighbours? How much does [...]
Today, we are divided over ideology, morality, culture, race and history. We are divided over whether America is the great nation we were raised to revere and love or a nation born in great sins and crimes. On the last days of the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump was holding four and five rallies a [...]
The idea of bipartisan comity, or some new era of national unity should Joe Biden win the coming election, is self-delusion. New divides in our society, manifest in 2020, are piled upon old divisions dating back decades. Now, not only are we fractured over ideology, religion, race, culture and morality, but also our country's history [...]
The struggle between good and evil that Frank Capra depicts in "Mr. Smith" is clearly understood by viewers as reflecting timeless truths about citizenship and living together in a free society. Even in the fractured public square we inhabit today, members of opposing political tribes can recognize our common humanity in the heroic and humble [...]
Americans have concluded that our prosperity, the flexibility of our political system, and the forward march of civilization ensure that a Bolshevik-style revolution could never happen here. But are we really so safe? When the Russian Revolution toppled the czar and put the Bolsheviks into power, the civilized countries of Western Europe had good reason [...]
If Alexis de Tocqueville were alive today and observing the situation of America, he would probably not be surprised that the democratic ethos of civil society, the township, and the autonomous local county have been crushed by the royal prerogatives of the executive and the administrative bureaucracy built around it. Most Americans are somewhat familiar [...]
Classical education is in a unique position to acknowledge in humility that every person is a sinner, and that some people and institutions in the West have been monstrously evil. Yet the Western heritage includes that which can never itself be complicit in evil: the true and the good, those inexhaustible resources that set us [...]
Does our modern body politic, like the human body, have a core? Obviously not. In fact, it seems fair to say that no one, culturally speaking, feels anything but disorientation and dislocation in this world of COVID and radical political division. Indeed, this election season rouses more dread of coming unrest, regardless of who wins, [...]
Life entails taking risks. The failure to see that seems to be behind the readiness of so many adults in our society to accept what seem to me to be criminal limitations on our economic and social freedoms in the name of security. If there is anything I do not wish to write about anymore, [...]
Can the residents of Seattle whose property and businesses were destroyed, vandalized, or shut down in June, when the city for three weeks allowed and approved of the “autonomous zone,” now sue the city? Two such lawsuits have in fact already been filed in federal court; and in one of them, seventeen different persons and [...]
In moving to the precise term "facial covering," instead of "mask," it becomes clearer that the effect is to blot out the human face and ultimately blot out God from our sight. On a recent visit to Charleston, South Carolina, I had an experience that led to a disturbing realization. Since then, I have been [...]
Until our elected officials, media, and “activists” stop rendering sentences on the basis of assumed verdicts garnered from piecing together a few time-bound, one-sided video clips and a truckload of assumptions about a “racist” or “white supremacist” country, we will not wake up from an increasingly horrific national nightmare for Americans of every race, creed, [...]
There are cultural battles that cannot be taken for granted without seriously risking freedom. The left clearly feels comfortable with conflict. Their campaign slogan is always the same: Change, no matter what. It reminds me of those shampoo brands that present a "new formula" and stop making the old one just as you had gotten [...]