Timothy Carney’s "Alienated America" tackles a crucial question that too few policymakers and news commentators even bother asking anymore: What is at the root of America’s contemporary cultural and social malaise? The short answer, according to Mr. Carney, is the deterioration of civil society. Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Other Places Collapse, by [...]
Ronald Reagan was truly a great president who led our nation through a critical period in our history, demonstrating tenacity, courage and faith. He faced down an enemy and never blinked. He inspired Americans to look to our better angels and reminded us that we hold the potential within us to do great things, with [...]
John Stuart Mill may well serve as an invaluable ally in searching out the roots of our ancient Anglo-American order that guarantee liberty as it coexists with order, neither at the other’s expense. He has a great deal of compassion and insight we could benefit from immensely, and it would be to our own disadvantage [...]
Pope St. John Paul II and Russell Kirk defended freedom within the limits of truth and its authentic or right use. They knew it was crucial to distinguish license and liberty. But they have different approaches to truth. As we discussed the work of Russell Kirk, written in 1954, revised in 1962 and 1988, I [...]
Smoking tobacco is not of necessity one of the permanent things that conservatives should cherish, but it does symbolize an older way of life and a different sensibility. Choosing to smoke makes one immediately recognizable as one who is not “with the times.” The incarnational element of "lighting up" In a recent article for The Free Press, journalist [...]
The task of conservation, in our present day, necessarily entails supporting liberal education. Those conservatives who do not support it will fail to conserve our Western identity. That is to say: they will fail to conserve anything significant, no matter how many tributes they pay to some abstract ideas of “freedom” or “liberty.” I’d like [...]
Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older [...]
A constitution has to have formal structures and requirements if it is to do its job of imposing the rule of law on people in positions of power. But for these formal structures to work, both the people and the governors they choose must recognize that they are important. I was at a conference recently [...]
The experience of nostalgia is a feeling of beauty’s remoteness, but only because it is so far in the future. It is hope. I went for a long walk in Oxford the other night. The city, of course, is always enchanting, but in early summer and at night, it is so the most. When summer [...]
The purpose of education has not remained the same over the course of roughly four centuries. By the early 20th century, education for Protestantization and Americanization began to give way to something called "progressive education.” Not surprisingly, it is progressive education that Richard Weaver targets. Published in 1964, Richard Weaver’s Visions of Order: The Cultural [...]
Willmoore Kendall contended that the conventional interpretation of John Locke, depicting him as an exponent of individualism and natural rights which transcended majority sentiments, was in error. By any reasonable standard of measurement, Willmoore Kendall would have to be included in a list of the most important political scientists of the post-World War II era. [...]
For the conservative, the universal imperative that binds human beings does not announce its purpose in simple, declaratory statements. How, then, does one discern its demands? First of all, a conservative is acutely aware of the flawed nature of man. The capacity of human reason is limited. Our existence is ultimately a great mystery. Conservatives [...]
Against a modern age that denied notions of meaning, purpose, and truth, Richard Weaver articulated a conservatism of hope and affirmation based on the Platonic-Christian heritage and its manifestation in the American South. Richard Weaver reasoned it was the emergence of nominalism, the departure from Platonism and Christianity, which produced the intellectual heresies leading to [...]
As I listened, all those years ago, to Rush Limbaugh defend Terry Schiavo's life and all human life, I remember thinking at the time that it was the most eloquent defense of life I had ever heard. Although it was 16 years ago, I remember it vividly. I was driving down I-270 in Maryland toward [...]