Dear Sir or Madam, I take it that, as a conservative, you will not quibble with the gender binary implied in my salutation, so I’ll just get to the point. Most of you probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump in your primary. You may even have identified with #NeverTrump or #StillNeverTrump or #NeverEverTrump or #AlwaysNeverTrump, [...]
Politics being the art of the possible, I venture to suggest here the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with true human happiness. I think that in this problem we need to refer to two principles. The first principle is that a good government allows the better and more energetic [...]
One day my fourteen-year-old daughter came home from her part-time job at the Goffstown New Hampshire Public Library and announced at dinner that she had volunteered me to serve as a Library Trustee. Two weeks later, I received a call from Mrs. Woodbury, the Town Clerk. She informed me that I could not run for [...]
What Alasdair MacIntyre used to know is that the modern nation-state cannot do anything truly good for its citizens. So how can we explain his recent call for the strong use of nation-state power in the realms of health, education, military service, and public speech? I. What Alasdair MacIntyre Knows What Alasdair MacIntyre used to [...]
In the fifth century B.C., Athens and her allies were at war with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War, made famous by the great historian Thucydides. In the first part of the war, Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was the leader of Athens; by all accounts, he was an able leader, not least because [...]
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is not a call to activism or a program for some version of social justice. It is, rather, a manifesto of political and social libertarianism that displays both the strengths and weaknesses of that trend in American thought. Henry David Thoreau’s long essay, first published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government,” [...]
Western social philosophy has produced many, many writings on the nature of sovereignty. Chiefly, these works are concerned with the individual or group of individuals who are entitled to rule. The medieval conception of divine right held that kings were the apex in a heavenly-ordained social order, ruling legitimately to the extent they upheld the [...]
A casual observer might be excused for believing that conservatives have a rather confused and conflicted view of the state. Albert J. Nock, a giant of early-twentieth-century conservatism, wrote a book titled Our Enemy the State. Yet Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, observed that “he who gave our nature to be perfected by [...]
There was a time a few decades ago when many people I knew did not merely want to be like P.J. O’Rourke, they actually wanted to be him. This largely included me, despite the fact that, even at my most young and stupid I recognized drug use for what it is: enslavement to the most [...]
We got away with increasing the national debt exponentially in a very short time because of a low-interest rate environment. But are you willing to bet that interest rates will always be rock-bottom? If you’re a young American, welcome to your inheritance. According to the United States Treasury, the total national debt is $18.2 trillion. [...]
The happiness of society is the end of government. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government, which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word happiness to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best. Editor’s Note: On the fourteenth day of January, 1784, the Revolutionary War ended as [...]
Contemporary politics leaves little room for so broad and imaginative an account of politics as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s. He defies labels, which is to say why our contemporary labels—as narrow as our imagination—defy him. That contemporary politics leaves little room for so broad and imaginative an account of politics as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s is evidence [...]
Like most members of the Republican leadership in both Houses of Congress, Paul Ryan should be voted out of office, in the primary, by the majority of his constituents who are significantly more conservative than he is. But Mr. Ryan should not be replaced because of his role in engineering passage of the vast omnibus [...]
Like many people I found the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference a little unsettling. And yet, unlike many people, my concerns had little or nothing to do with the issue of climate change itself. Whether global warming is actually happening or not, and whether, if it is happening, it is caused by manmade pollution, [...]