Flannery O’Connor understood that what is wrong with the world is not our failure to adhere to a certain political or economic program, as important as these may be. Instead, what is wrong with the world is sin. And so, the task for those of us who want to renew and preserve Western culture 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 [...]
Today, wherever the intelligent among us may still be found, the idea of Monarchy shimmers and beckons along the periphery of our collective intellectual subconscious; we suspect it has something that will save us from the erosions of shabby egalitarianism, from our sordid democracies and their petulant, tiresome, subversive “rights.” “Then Perceval was told that [...]
When we strip away all the fancy arguments and strong opinions about capitalism, or industrialism if you like, we see a person in the workplace is a commodity, a thing to be used up and discarded. As a result, capitalism creates a thing-oriented society, where machines, profits, and properties are more important than people. I [...]
Irving Babbitt was an eccentric, armed with both a brilliant mind and personality. While we ought to remember his thought, we should also remember the man. As the leader of the American humanists, Irving Babbitt (1864-1933) stood solidly and forthrightly in the American conservative tradition of John Adams and Nathaniel Hawthorne and drew upon the [...]
The aristocratic element of democracy is its long-term quality. It has reverence for the past and it plans for the future. This is the necessary instinct democracy needs anew. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, relates the story of the murder of Callisthenes by Alexander the Great, the “everlasting crime” of the Macedonian leader. Seneca wrote: “For [...]
As G.K. Chesterton observed what was happening all around him in England, he was led to conclude that there were historical moments when what he termed “over-civilization” and what he termed “barbarism” were close to becoming one and the same thing. Virtually the same thing might be said of America today. Just where is our [...]
One of the best contemporary memoirs I’ve read in the last decade is My Grandfather’s Son, which was published in 2007. In his tale that ended with the fierce 1991 confirmation battle for his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas told a remarkable story of his journey from being raised by a single [...]
Demands for statesmanship tend to hold up a model of greatness in political leadership that is profoundly dangerous. The desire to be “great” by upholding the interests of the nation as a political whole promotes a massive increase in the extent and centralization of political power. I recently attended a conference on statesmanship. Truth be [...]
Each nation, however small, is called to be a new David. It is through the small and beautiful power of local cultures that the globalist Goliath will be defeated. There are two types of nationalism. There is the “nationalism” of the great nations which all too often manifests itself in the imposition of the nation’s [...]
Even fairytales, or perhaps especially fairytales, should always tell the truth. So, here’s one truth: Big Dog was a bad dog. Just ask any of her neighbors. She had bitten more than her fair share, and if some of them had also torn into her from time to time, well, that still was no excuse. [...]
Matthew Continetti may want a “viable” conservatism, but does he desire a winning conservatism. He seems more determined that the Republican Party and the conservative movement begin the difficult, but necessary, task of “untangling” themselves from Donald Trump rather than build a winning coalition. The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti [...]
Particularly in dangerous times, the true patriot has a duty to resist the call to blind nationalist obedience so that he may serve his nation’s true interests, and help it to live up to its duty to obey a law higher than itself. Perhaps the most famous quotation from the great Tory lexicographer Samuel Johnson [...]
The once dominant and implicitly ecumenical philosophy of fusionism has been denounced by a chorus of right-wing critics as a "dead consensus." Fusionism, some critics assert, was perhaps a necessary contrivance during the Cold War but is now irrelevant. And so a determined quest for yet another formulation of conservatism has begun. The Fall of [...]