Forming good manners and helping to make our country beautiful—not cynically undercutting our institutions—is part of the task of education. Our students must know that we can never concede the fight to those who would plunge our institutions into the abyss of ideological slavery, and who wish to undercut the understanding of shared responsibility and [...]
Modern conservative fondness for the age of the suit is rooted in a sense of order, decency, and the natural. There is a profound irony in this, however: the conservative heroes who lived through that age were decidedly less enthusiastic about its fashions. Since at least the publication of The Young Fogey Handbook in 1985, [...]
Paul Elmer More offered one of the single best critiques of Friedrich Nietzsche, delving deeply into the essence of his thought, in both attraction and repulsion, finding that it is in the attempt to reconcile the love and apprehension about Nietzsche that best allows one to understand him. “Who has ever been concerned for me [...]
We live in a world completely mastered and permeated by economic ideals, yet expecting better government within societies brought up on humanitarian thinking strikes us as yet another fantasy. Much has changed since the solutions posited by humanist thinkers of the last century, so what can we do in this world? What can we bet [...]
It is difficult to know when an era has ended. The events dominating the news today—presidential impeachment, deep state subversion of secret surveillance courts, confused and prolonged wars, out-of-control debt and government spending, and a radicalized educational and media culture—suggest something quite profound is threatening American governance. But it is not so clear precisely what. [...]
In mid-December, I had the pleasure and honour of taking part in a public debate in Hungary on Christian Democracy and its role in contemporary European politics. I was one of a panel of five “experts,” which included a German, a Pole, a Hungarian, and, last but not least, a fellow Englishman, Theodore Dalrymple, who [...]
Our age is undergoing what many have described as a “Great Realignment.” This is nowhere more true than among conservatives. The fusion that brought together under Ronald Reagan social conservatives, free marketers, and national defense hawks has largely un-fused of late. Many conservatives have begun to talk about a “dead consensus.”[1] Given the nature of [...]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary links the persecution of Christians in other parts of the globe to the increasing hostility towards mainstream Christianity in Europe. A “mysterious force seals the lips,” he asserts, not only of politicians in the West to this persecution, but also of most of those in the media. Is there, [...]
“It would be difficult to find anywhere in the history of politics a more powerful and potentially revolutionary doctrine than Rousseau’s theory of the General Will. Power is freedom and freedom is power,” Robert Nisbet argued in his magnum opus, 1953’s Quest for Community. […]
Only a fool would be blithely optimistic about the New Year. Those of us who have been seasoned by many seasons have seen enough old New Years to be cautious of their promises. Experience teaches us that each New Year does not ring out the old in order to ring in the new; it is [...]
Many scholars, heroes, and even martyrs among great Christian figures have either been forgotten or “sanitized” to meet modern standards. Others, like G.K. Chesterton, have simply become “deplorable”—i.e., utterly unacceptable to contemporary sensibilities. Is Mr. Ahlquist correct in deeming Chesterton a saint whom we might pray to rather than for? I leave that question up to [...]
At least since the time of the ancient philosopher Plato, private property rights have posed challenges to those aspiring to craft a just political society. During the nascent years of American civilization, the Pilgrim settlers of the New Plymouth Plantation followed a partly Platonic model of a commonwealth. The survival of their settlement, they initially [...]
The moral imagination of E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology discerned great value in the cultures he studied, and he spoke out against the destruction of that value. By doing so he exhibited the finest elements of his own particular Western cultural inheritance, as a Christian, English gentleman, who was later, and appropriately, knighted. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of [...]
Though counter-globalist, Cardinal Robert Sarah’s “The Day Is Now Far Spent” is not anti-Western, but is an emphatic rejection of liberal anthropology—which strikes him as blasphemous, positing a decontextualized individual, one who needs neither family nor neighbor nor even God Almighty. The Day Is Now Far Spent, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (385 pages, Ignatius Press, [...]