Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is a cautionary tale about the horror of totalitarianism. It matters little from which camp the horror originates: Left, Right, Democrat, or Republican. Horror is horror. As the Left and, increasingly, the Right continue to turn their backs on all things sacred, they are left only with themselves. In October of [...]
In his own day, George Washington served as a pillar of Atlantis, recognized not only for his willingness to sacrifice his life for the great Republic, but also as the founder of the first serious Republic a weary world had witnessed in centuries. He deserves the title “the American Marcus Aurelius.” In his own day [...]
James Harrington insists on the possibility of an empire of laws. The claim that institutional arrangements can force self-interested behavior to serve the common interest underlies the system of separated powers and checks and balances central to the American constitutional order. But is he right? Can this theory of “dividing-and-choosing” give us confidence? “Two [girls] [...]
If in fact the prudential, immediate goal of conservatives is simply to defend what remains of our heritage and forestall a slide into anarchy, then what is it conservatives can do to sustain our Republic of Hustlers? At our 2009 annual meeting, the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress was exposed to some surreal [...]
American conservatism is rooted in what it understands to be the principles which guided our Founders; principles which, in turn, it sees as rooted in the better part of Western civilization, though adapted to the peculiarities of the American condition. The chief difficulty in assessing the state of contemporary American conservatism is arriving at some [...]
Anger has come to characterize our polarized political environment. And in recent years, conservatives and Republicans have seemingly been injected with anger. But this angry identity is not compatible with the central meaning of conservatism. An admirable trait of conservatives is their willingness to openly reexamine their policies and prescriptions. Then again, the troubling trait [...]
No society can survive if its people cannot achieve general consensus on certain fundamental understandings regarding the nature of the person and of society itself. It may seem too much to say that our country has never been as divided as it is today. Anti-war protests, race riots, and especially a bloody Civil War would [...]
The strongest point of Netflix's series "The Crown" is that it shows the moral decline of Britain and the West through the moral decline of one British family. As such, it is a sad and searing witness to the same state of fractured families and mutilated marriages we face across the waning West. Having completed [...]
Why are the American people so ready to give themselves over to an emperor? Why do they want a god-king? I would suggest that our very loss of the classical world—especially in education—has led us to forget the great lessons of Western civilization. For what it’s worth, I do not consider myself a political person, [...]
As she grows up in her bitterness, Greta Thunberg—the poster child of the eco-movement—comes out of the red closet. Her embracing of the left proves that climate activism taken to its final consequences will always lead to anti-Western communist ideology. When climate activist Greta Thunberg appeared on the scene some years ago, the media celebrated [...]
When it’s written, the history of our time won’t dwell long on the hardships of the recent past. But history will ask: Did a nation borne of hope lose hope? Did a people forged by courage find courage wanting? Did a generation steeled by hard war and a harsh peace forsake honor at the moment [...]
A key lesson of Sophocles’ “Antigone” is that fanaticism results when public actors fail to practice the one virtue capable of moderating the excesses of human nature: political prudence. In an insightful essay (“Idolatry in Lockdown,” Law and Liberty, January 28, 2021), Spencer Klavan reflects on the contemporary significance of the conflict at the heart [...]
A radical polarization is going on in our own day. Knowing better, people interpret others as short-sighted and selfish, demonize their affiliations, and tar them with imputed evil. The hard question facing us is a political one: how long will we be able to sustain our constitutional forms? The still harder question, though, is what [...]
It is fitting that one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century should also have been one of its most obscure. Nicolás Gómez Dávila's critique of democracy may go some way in explaining why he remains a relatively unknown figure in the English-speaking world, for we in the modern West are all children [...]