A few weeks ago I wrote some mild criticisms of the Beatles and the sky fell. Angry readers called me “ignorant,” “vicious,” and various other things displaying blindness to my finer qualities. I hadn’t realized there was a militant Beatle Taliban, and I was an infidel. I was lucky to escape a fatwa. Some of the [...]
Ronald Reagan & Russell Kirk At the beginning of the twentieth century, few states in the world could be called democratic. Yet much personal and local freedom existed under the reign of law. Near the close of the twentieth century, nearly every political regime throughout the world professes to be democratic. Yet in [...]
“Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects,” said Aristotle. But if the Philosopher disliked the form of government that arose out of the fallacy of human equality, the Founding Fathers detested it. “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule,” said Thomas [...]
Scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it. –Histories, Polybius Infirmity doth still neglect all office Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves When nature, [...]
Your people, sir, is…a great beast. So Alexander Hamilton reputedly said in an argument with Thomas Jefferson. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton explained: Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other [...]
“By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to [...]