How on earth did we stray so far from the paths of wisdom that we find ourselves in this God-forsaken place that is our modern world? I am fond of telling the story of an American tourist who gets himself hopelessly lost somewhere in the wilds of the west of Ireland. In desperation, he stops [...]
Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In the opening [...]
Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his [...]
There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]
Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, the the head of the Wagner Group, advanced on Moscow when the government refused to address his criticisms of the war effort in Ukraine. There is an obscure episode in Russian history that provides a revealing, albeit imperfect, analogue to this recent event: the so-called Kornilov Affair of 1917. For twenty-four [...]
To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]
It is completely possible that America has failed, although I certainly hope not. If one believes in the resurrection, one has to always believe that it is at least possible that this or that political entity can be renewed and revived, and that any political association can learn how to bow the knee to the [...]
Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]
Propelled by delusions and united by hatred, growing numbers of Americans believe that political violence is justified, necessary, and even at times desirable. If we no longer can, or care to, adhere to the dictates of civility and reason, then we will have surrendered control of our destiny and will become the authors of our [...]
There is a lot of talk these days about an increasing interest in socialism. It is quite the conundrum if approached within the assumptions of late liberalism: why indeed would the victors in the Cold War seek to become their vanquished enemies? Pope Pius XI helps us through this problem. He helps us see that [...]
As the father guides the son deeper into virtue through the son’s obedience, through his good inclinations, his particular instantiation of the virtues, so the prince serves as a father to the city itself. The collapse of liberal moral and political order has led to a welcome revival in Catholic political thought. This revival, however, [...]
If we approach history through the lens of a twenty-first-century secular liberal, we will necessarily see history as a series of events that conform to the labels and forms of secular liberalism. We will be limited in what we see in the past and, thus, necessarily limit what we can propose for the future. In [...]
Gerald R. Ford took office at a time when “we didn’t need to look into the future but assure ourselves we had one.” And though biographer Richard Norton Smith argues that Ford was not a visionary, he did recognize the “long-term consequences of a public sector growing faster than the private economy that sustained it.” [...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]