Andrew Jackson revealed his most republican self in his governorship. He not only continued Spanish civil and property law, thus ensuring that Spanish citizens would not be harmed, but he also extended English common law to Florida, especially in criminal matters… Though Andrew Jackson only served a very short term as governor of Florida, several [...]
Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976–1980 by Craig Shirley (432 pages, Broadside Books, 2017) The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism by Henry Olsen (368 pages, Broadside Books, 2017) Of all the questions that divide conservatives in 2018, the most basic might be this: Are we living in wilderness years under a [...]
The adversaries of Modernity were raising their voices some forty years ago in Switzerland, France, Australia, and other countries; the journal Modern Age was intended to become, in considerable part, an American protest against the illusions of Modernity; and so it has remained… It was not without irony, thirty years ago, that I clapped the name [...]
We are witnessing storm troopers in cyber-space “pulling the plug” on those whose voices they refuse to tolerate. Two personal experiences of such censorship—both of which relate to The Imaginative Conservative itself—will suffice to illustrate the trend… The interference of Google and Facebook in the recent Irish referendum on abortion raises serious concerns about the [...]
“Seinfeld” may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art. It’s a comic study of life after several decades of a counterculture that supposedly upended all the rules of life, definitely obscured the path to maturity, and persistently encouraged doing as one likes. The long-running sitcom Seinfeld has been in frequent syndication on [...]
The civic-nationalist view holds that subscribing to the philosophy of the Founding—equality, opportunity, individualism—is the defining trait of the American people. But others argue that it is those uniquely American practices that order the rhythms of life that make us love the United States as our home… This past weekend, there was a wedding some [...]
When Andrew Jackson learned that John C. Calhoun had been deceiving him for more than a decade, Jackson understandably exploded in rage. While Andrew Jackson was moving against the Seminoles, the Spanish, and the British in Florida in the late 1810s, he had assumed that his closest ally in President James Monroe’s cabinet was John [...]
At a minimum, a restoration of conservative thought requires paying attention to primitive history and to what it might tell us about the things that fusionism has long assumed are most important about tradition—as well as what this new knowledge reveals about the viability of freedom… Modern American conservatism rose in the 1950s under [...]
When Andrew Jackson died in 1845, he had still not aligned himself officially with the Democratic party, still believing himself a natural and cultivated republican. Was he, then, an Old Republican? Despite being associated with the “Democratic Party,” then and now, it is unclear whether Andrew Jackson offered much thought about the Democratic Party or [...]
Neither the leftist Marxist multiculturalists nor the Neoconservatives reflect the genuine beliefs or inheritance left to us by those who came to these shores centuries ago. Both reject the historic conservatism of the South, which embodied that inheritance and the vision of the Founders… No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to [...]
What has alarmed me most as I moved away from liberalism—or as it moved away from me—was how quick my liberal friends were to renounce and reject our delicate social fabric as oppressive, as exclusionary, or as just plain worthless. Churches? Schools? Communities? Not just anachronisms, according to the New Liberalism, but dangerous threats to [...]
Michael Oakeshott’s conception of conservatism was not without its critics. Among them was the American intellectual and self-avowed conservative, Irving Kristol… In 1956, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott published “On Being Conservative,”[1] a statement of “the conservative disposition” as he conceived it. Although largely well received, Oakeshott’s conception of conservatism was not without its critics. [...]
Much has been written in recent years about the increasing polarization in American politics. Republicans have moved further to the right, while Democrats have moved further to the left. And seldom do they even attempt to meet anywhere in the middle. The phenomenon is undeniable. It’s observable on a daily basis and confirmed by polling [...]
Some sound instinct kept Albert Jay Nock from ever becoming a reformer, in the usual sense. He was never a tub-thumper for some system; never an organization man. He was, to the contrary, a lifelong learner. Albert Jay Nock died too soon, but not before he had nailed to the mast several of the paradoxes [...]