The erosion of history is the first necessary step to the left’s transformation of the foundations of culture and society—a transformation that sees an ahistorical all-powerful government replacing all other traditional civic institutions. A recent report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed a dramatic fall in history test scores among eighth graders. Given [...]
Natural law terrifies the left, which assumed it had long ago died. Leftists cannot admit that there might be those who welcome ordered liberty and restraint. They cannot see that nihilism awaits on the other side of a flawed legal positivist system that will lead to every mode of emptiness and despair. The left is [...]
Even in this darkness, there is hope. Because liberalism is a Christian heresy, it has held and still does hold the breach between the peace and the coming darkness, when anti-Christian technocratic power will be all in all. And in this time that liberalism has bought us, we can act, pray, and by the power [...]
A history of the transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century could well be told with just a focus on free speech and censorship. But this story of changed attitudes toward censorship yields lessons far beyond just the liberal attitude toward free speech. Aside from the inevitability of death and taxes, there is another [...]
The cloistered nun reminds us that, despite appearances, the purpose of our lives is not to be useful—not for the liberal project, nor even for the Church. Rather, the meaning of every vocation is simply to "be" for God alone, a "being-for that," as the monastery reveals, is never really useless in the end. Liberalism cannot [...]
D.C. Schindler's "The Politics of the Real" is a brilliant addition to the postliberal movement. By understanding liberalism as a distortion of the Christian order, we can recognize it as a sustained war upon reality. And we can understand a true postliberalism as nothing more or less than the New Evangelization, the effort of converting entire [...]
Society has been reduced to those living in the present; but in being reduced, it has excluded the democracy of the dead and unborn. We, in the present, must fight for this most obscure of all classes. In the abortion debate, one of the pro-choice arguments is based on the idea of “personhood.” Personhood is [...]
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 [...]
At the heart of Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought lies the “restless mind”—a mind that sees the essence of humanity in the realization that each of us “dies alone” and that life is but a fleeting moment hedged in between the abysses of the pre-born and the dead. The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the [...]
Many so-called conservatives are buying into the progressive presumption that things are progressing inexorably in one direction, which the progressives think is a liberated future and which conservatives think is a libertine hell. Such conservatives agree with the progressive perspective; they just don’t like it! It is odd that those who consider themselves “progressives” assign [...]
Is it possible to reconcile our commitment to the abstract truth at the heart of American politics—that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights—with prudence and restraint in statecraft on the international stage? In November of 2003—eight months after American forces first put boots on the ground in the Iraq War—President [...]
“Woke” is a doomed word since it expresses a distorted reality. It is based upon Critical Race Theory that frames the debate to favor a class-struggle narrative, dividing humanity into oppressors and oppressed. Like all Marxist lingo, “woke” deepens resentments instead of healing them. If there is any word guaranteed to enhance a conversation or [...]
Into the breach—or onto the deserted ground—has marched a new metaphysics in the form of a new religion. In “The Madness of Crowds,” Douglas Murray explains this “religion” of identity politics. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray (304 pages, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021) A better title for this book might have [...]
In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection. It is true that the classics, especially Virgil and Cicero, along [...]