Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position. There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying the cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]
By affirming our human limitations, conservatism actually opens our minds to learning and discovering… Conservatives have always been portrayed as backward and unenlightened simpletons. This is true especially today because intellectual conservatives are being sidelined by identitarian and populist conservatism. This is not to excuse the Left. On the contrary, the Left’s insistence on presenting conservatives [...]
Conservatives should be troubled by Thomas West's claim that America has always been liberal and that the only historical discourse available today is that same liberalism. Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, by Thomas G. West (211 pages, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) Thomas West has written a courageous [...]
The liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence… After the trip to Washington, DC, where I thrilled at seeing the U.S. [...]
Contemporary liberalism provides solutions that only exacerbate current domestic and international tensions… The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights by Liav Orgad (Oxford University Press, 2016) Liberal constitutional and political theory has increasingly defended the status of often newly created or invented minorities, defined more expansively with each new theoretical formulation, as [...]
The Myth of Liberalism offers a concise argument of the adequacy of modern liberalism and a re-presention of how classical/medieval understanding of family and virtue really is a superior understanding of the human good… “Contemporary liberalism is less a political philosophy than a façade for undermining extant social and legal mores.” —John Safranek, The Myth [...]
As long as words are left undefined, their meanings are vague and are left up to the listener’s or reader’s imagination. Many on the left have manipulated language in this way… What’s in a Definition? Defining one’s terms is important.[1] Yet, terms are often left undefined when speaking about the most important of subjects. In [...]
Critics have taken to calling the leftist agitators who are running roughshod over university campuses hypocrites. The reasoning is that these self-described social-justice warriors, by shouting down speakers, silencing dissent on social media, and forcing resignations from those they accuse of “injustice,” are betraying the very toleration that allows them to speak freely. Unfortunately, the [...]
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 [...]
An avowed socialist is running for the presidential nomination of one of the two dominant political parties. Same-sex marriage has been proclaimed the law of the land. Levels of church attendance and religious belief have dropped significantly. And political correctness has run amok on campus, on the net, and in the entertainment industry. One could [...]
Bernie Sanders, the Democrats’ only (openly) socialist presidential candidate joined the chorus of criticism against Walmart a while back. But many conservatives also spend a good deal of time and effort criticizing the discount store giant. The mass hysteria of Christmas shopping season provides an opportunity to reconsider Walmart—at least to a certain, limited extent. [...]
Pope Francis is no liberal and conservatives must stop insisting he is. Despite an effort by left-leaning media and political elites to cast the Holy Father as an expositor of their ideological agenda, Francis’ repeated expressions of compassion, understanding, and love should not be misinterpreted as a vehicle to promote the anti-Christian tenets of Western [...]
It is not simply that carnivores eat meat—that hardly justifies the news headline*—nor that cute bears eat meat or even (cover your children’s eyes) kill other animals for the meat that they need rather than, say, buy it by the bucketful from KFC. That is not funny enough. This is—scientists have seen warm, cuddly, innocent, [...]
If you look carefully around your house you might see one, possibly under the bed; but most are probably invisible. A baku eats nightmares, human nightmares and all manner of bad dreams. He has a bear’s body, an elephant’s trunk, a tiger’s paws, an ox’s tail and rhinoceros eyes. “Oh! That baku!” you say, and [...]