Working toward the restoration of the original American exceptionalism is a good idea, not to mention a more truly progressive one. Such an effort is still possible. Remember President Barack Obama’s response to a question concerning his thoughts on American exceptionalism? Yes, the president replied, he believed in American exceptionalism—just as a Brit believes in [...]
Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility. What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit? In October 2012, during a televised presidential debate President Barack Obama earned laughs and pleased pundits when he mocked his opponent, Governor [...]
What’s rarely remembered about Barry Goldwater is how deeply influenced he was by the founder of post-war conservatism, Russell Kirk. I will admit, it’s hard for me to believe that Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency sixty years ago. Sixty years ago! I was born three years later, but I grew up in a very [...]
Each year the third Sunday in June is designated as Father’s Day, a day on which we honor our Nation’s fathers for everything they do for their families and for America. Today fatherhood is sometimes drily described as a craft or an occupation, something which competes with career or outside pursuits for time and attention. [...]
Both Roger Scruton and Yoram Hazony argue that the nation-state has its virtues. In the current “global conflict,” Scruton urged, “the nation is one of the things that we must keep." Sir Roger Scruton wrote of a “turning point in our history”[1], and this turning point was about the nation. Scruton believed that the “greatest [...]
Unlike our present politicians, George Washington and Russell Kirk cared about the common good, strove for it, and constantly reminded us what it means to be a citizen of a republic. Dear Imaginative Conservative reader, as we approach this journal's fourteenth birthday, I owe a humble apology (bless me, Father, for I have sinned!) to [...]
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. On June 6, 1984—the 40th anniversary of D-Day—President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to an audience of D-Day veterans and world [...]
Where there is Pride, there is prejudice; where there is prejudice, there is hatred; where there is hatred, there is the dehumanizing of the enemy; and where there is the dehumanizing of the enemy, there is the extermination that follows. As I watch the rise of the politics of hatred sweep like an angry wave [...]
Fareed Zakaria’s book is a defense of liberalism in the European sense of a regime of limited government, free markets, rule of law, moral indifference, maximized freedom, and unending progress. He turns all those who support the conservative cause into resentful, racist individuals left behind by progress. Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 [...]
Under Louis Napoleon III, the Second French Empire was more successful than the first, and more successful than any political administration in France up to that point. An Empire focused on domestic order and growth had finally brought the liberty and prosperity that Republics and Monarchies had failed to achieve. How could such a successful [...]
In very different historical circumstances, two strong-willed, athletic men with intelligence and leadership ability survived multiple dangers, but neither attributed his survival to his abilities or to sheer willpower. Instead, both men consistently and publicly credited Divine Providence. Their stories are well-known, but worth reviewing, since they serve as witnesses to us in our own [...]
The importance of George Ticknor lies in contrasts, which bring into relief another America. As an old Federalist who worked to undergird volatile American democracy with traditions, Ticknor and his Brahmin compatriots “wove a tapestry of conviction and hope, doubt and despair, which became a conservative testament.” In July 1836, a European statesman and an [...]
We have no way of knowing whether the twenty-first-century collapse is yet another momentary stumble or finally the Dark Age. Like good Carolingians, however, we keep looking backwards for our recovery, trying to rebuild what we once had. Christopher Dawson’s prophetic The Making of Europe (1932) ends where the Gentle Reader might expect such a book to [...]
The sanitizing of Thomas Jefferson has played a role in the crippling of public discourse. Nowadays, anyone who would discuss something so anodyne as political decentralization or states' rights has to walk on eggshells, lest he find himself attacked and stigmatized by enforcers of political orthodoxy. We should question an American political establishment that obfuscates [...]