“They say you won’t succeed because ‘making a man President cannot change him.’ But making a man President can change him! Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine.” On September 22, 1881, [...]
To be real, a Constitution must be lived, not honored in the breach. For without constitutional morality, there is no Constitution. And down that road, much hard experience already has taught us, lies tyranny. The Framers were acutely sensitive to the fears of many that a new federal government would erode the independence and authority [...]
The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself. “A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the [...]
The spirit of good nationalism is inseparable from the spirit of humility. It loves its neighbours. A good nationalist loves the good nationalists in other nations because they love their country as he loves his. A good nationalist knows that bad nationalism is merely imperialism wearing a patriotic mask. Nationalism has a bad name and [...]
H.G. Wells sought to free humanity from the “bondage” of tradition, but T.S. Eliot saw history not as an evolutionary movement, but a return to the past. While T.S. Eliot never made any comments critical of Charles Darwin or his theory of the evolution of species, he was quite critical of various popularized versions of [...]
During his final illness, Blaise Pascal often refused the care of his physician, saying: “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” He believed that human beings had been created to suffer. Misery was the condition of life in this world. My uncle made book for a living. That is, he took money from those who [...]
In essence, “true England” is the England which has been true to the truth itself or, more correctly, the England which has been true to the Truth Himself. Luisella Scrosati interviews Joseph Pearce. LS: Your book, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, is focused on the key idea of a true England, [...]
By the fall of 1932, most Americans had come to perceive the depression differently than they had at its beginning. Growing numbers began to worry that depression, rather than being a temporary and purgative event, marked a permanent condition of material scarcity and economic stagnation. With fears mounting that the economy is about to slip [...]
The Nation-State possesses an absolute moral authority that overrules the authority of any religion and every individual citizen.The new barbarians gave to the Nation-State a weapon that Genghis Khan never dreamed of, a “technically-sweet” marvel that could destroy humankind thrice over on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I am a Romanian gypsy from a long line [...]
There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and the various neo-medievalist movements which were its fruits. The most important is that society is not progressing inexorably in one “progressive” rationalist direction. The eighteenth century was a time of religious skepticism which seemed to foreshadow the eclipse of [...]
Seeing himself and his allies on the losing side of the war against the modern spirit, Irving Babbitt made a fierce call to arms, advocating the need for a “remnant” to preserve all that is good, true, and beautiful. Irving Babbitt In his own day and age, Irving Babbitt’s (1865-1933) many opponents—from Ernest [...]
There is a Tory tradition in America that runs against the grain of establishment Liberalism, embracing home, hearth, community, family, church, nature, and the moral realities of everyday life, and opposed to individualism, unlimited free markets, libertarianism, secularism, and the rootless loneliness of global modernity. This tradition comes from within America, not without. One day [...]
Today, wherever the intelligent among us may still be found, the idea of Monarchy shimmers and beckons along the periphery of our collective intellectual subconscious; we suspect it has something that will save us from the erosions of shabby egalitarianism, from our sordid democracies and their petulant, tiresome, subversive “rights.” “Then Perceval was told that [...]
Methodist minister Joseph Cross, a South Carolina native, traveled in Europe in the late 1850s, emerging as a nationalist committed to democracy, material progress, and enthusiastic Evangelical Protestantism. With the publication of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 the southern conservative intellectual tradition definitively entered into consciousness of the American academy and the American literati. [...]