For the most part, the term “checklist conservative” is used to imply that the person criticizing a Trump Supporter is an Establishment Conservative. But is this new insult justified?… A new political insult has emerged in recent months: “checklist conservatism.” It is a charge leveled at all kinds of self-identified conservatives whenever they accuse members [...]
Pretty much every thinking person on the Right is in therapy these days trying to break out of his ideological bubble and fit within the new world of Donald Trump. […]
Steve Bannon is a deeply thoughtful pugilist who does not care what you think. Some will say this is a recipe for disaster. I say it’s just what we need… Out of the blue in the summer of 2014, I received an email from Steve Bannon asking if I ever published anyplace other than Crisis Magazine [...]
The most important of the virtues for conservatives is fortitude—the courage to take stands that are not popular, the courage to ignore the opinion polls… In moments of despair, when I think America is indeed slouching towards an unfashionable address, when I contemplate the apparent indifference of the public to corruption and perjury in high [...]
Because we Americans have become so infatuated with the power and person of the presidency, we have forgotten our republican duty to promote our sovereignty in legislative bodies… If you were interested in finding the single harshest and yet reasoned critic of the twentieth-century nation-state, you would not, strangely enough, turn to a libertarian. You [...]
No informed person will deny that conservatism has been having a rough time for several decades. But to pass from the presence of conflict to a conclusion that control and discipline and order have no place in the world is to reverse the process by which political judgments should be arrived at… The Conservative Illusion, [...]
In its short, sharp life, “The Burke Newsletter” offered a model for all of us hoping to change the world through ideas, not ideology, through persuasion, not violence… Edmund Burke In “The Conservative Conspiracy of the 1950s” I had the privilege of writing about the alliance formed among Russell Kirk, Peter Stanlis, and other [...]
Why do conservatives conserve? And what is worth conserving? What is free enterprise? What is law? What is dignity? If these questions intrigue you, join Dr. Bradley Birzer as he explores answers to these questions.... This address was given at the Free Enterprise Institute’s 40th Annual Founders’ Day Breakfast (October 2016). Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Books by [...]
Left-wingers—the beatnik, the hippie, the flower-power revolutionary—used to be the subversives. But now their society is ripe for revolution, and it would seem that it is the conservative who is the new subversive… T.S. Eliot wrote something somewhere along the lines of, “In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to [...]
Whereas Adam Smith had warned that government must intervene in the economy from time to time, Edmund Burke believed any interference in the economy on the part of government to be a violation of the natural law… […]
The “conservative wars” between neoconservatives and the Old Right became particularly bitter after a stormy session at the Philadelphia Society in 1986. Mr. Gleaves Whitney, the president of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies and a Senior Contributor to this journal, has written about an event that I remember well.* I was involved in it, [...]
Forgetting flawed human nature, the reason-worshipper becomes a sort of fundamentalist of the mind, convinced that intellect alone holds the key to wisdom. To know The Conservative Mind is to know the mind of its remarkable author, Russell Kirk. He was an old-fashioned man—courtly, retiring, serene, formal in dress and manner—whose view of the world, proclaimed by [...]
Christianity, Edmund Burke held, is the great equalizer. Not only is it the first force in the world to recognize the moral equality of all men and women, but it allows the high and the low to become one in their equal desire for the good society… In a manner similar to Cicero with the [...]
The primary responsibility of the young scholar is to an integrity as person—that is, to a fulfillment of his gifts as this person, limited in gifts but sharing with humanity a nature as intellectual soul incarnate… Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” At this turning of a millennium it is [...]