The direction that constitutional practice has taken in the past hundred years shows that the Framers’ conception of republican government has passed and the era of populist democracy has arrived. The underlying transformation of the unwritten constitution renders efforts to return to the Framers’ original intent problematic. Much has been written in the past century [...]
Larry Elder’s film “Uncle Tom” is a must-see for anybody who thinks all black people think alike or that American black history is simply a history of victimhood. They’re black, they’re proud, and they’re all-American—just like the film they’re in. While it is unlikely that blacks will vote as a majority for Donald Trump or [...]
“You Americans have no idea what you have here.” That line was spoken to me in heavily accented English roughly a half century ago. It hit me hard at the time, and it has popped into my head many times since. The speaker was a Czech immigrant, who also happened to be my landlord. A [...]
The convergence of the American and British presidential and parliamentary systems on a new form of tyranny poses a serious threat to what scholar Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion,” the only civilized hope of free government known to mankind today. Introduction In his classic 1867 book The English Constitution, the great Economist editor and [...]
The lesson for American conservatives is this: Shrink the size and aspirations of government at home and abroad; shun future foreign entanglements as General Washington advised; but keep cooperating more closely with Afghans and stick it out for America’s own lasting safety. If American leaders can survive the impatience of their electorate, success may be [...]
Every empire had security reasons, to go along with economic ones, to justify permanent military occupation. I say this: Kill the terrorists. Destroy their bases. When necessary, go back and do it again. Don’t occupy foreign nations. As the United States pulls its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year war, The Imaginative Conservative looks back at [...]
The Afghan War was, at its inception, a just war. If the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and those who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 Americans, we had a right to go in after him. But we decided to stay on and convert the most tribalized and xenophobic land on earth into [...]
An unquestioned sense of nationalistic superiority, racial no longer, is now more American than British, and in Afghanistan every step of interaction from American officials is calculated to diminish, insult or express official disdain for the foreign subjects of Empire. As the United States pulls its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year war, The [...]
From innumerable living room debates, I see people not only do not know how to argue, but do not care to. Instead they leap to quarrel, so that interruptions, interjections, a raised rate and volume of speech, heightened emotion, the dismissive sneer, and the personal attack become ‘rebuttal.’ The olden days. We professed rhetoric, always [...]
The late historian M.E. Bradford’s examination of early American history provides us with a framework for understanding the American experience and so gives a standard to clarify our present darkness. His Old Whiggism is a rhetoric of the heart, an appeal to stand in the old ways, to keep alive the spirit of the original [...]
By turns eager and reluctant to embrace newcomers, Americans in the twentieth century followed no uniform course of action. In 1919, when sections of almost every major American city were teeming with men and women who spoke a multiplicity of languages, former president Theodore Roosevelt, wondered whether the United States had not become a “polyglot [...]
Without a deep religious faith, Whittaker Chambers could hardly have made his stand against Communism and, in fact, almost failed to do so. “The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.” —Stepan Trofimvovitch, in The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is the [...]
What is the source of moral authority for modernity's doctrine that homosexuality is moral, other than some transient ideology, which Russell Kirk reminded us is political religion? What is the source of the morality that teaches same-sex unions are the equal of traditional marriage and any government that does not agree is a bigoted regime [...]
Will elementary, secondary, and university students, off campus as well as on campus, be forbidden to criticize, for example, critical race theory and the new American history curricula? And will that prohibition be extended to parents? The grandiose and centralized cradle-through-college education plans of Joe Biden and the Democratic party have now been plainly stated. [...]