Since nations are first and foremost cultural realities, the long-term viability and sustainability of nation states depends on the existence of healthy and living national cultures. If the culture withers and decays, the nation state will wither and decay in the culture’s wake. There are good practical and pragmatic political reasons for retaining the presence of [...]
We live in a world completely mastered and permeated by economic ideals, yet expecting better government within societies brought up on humanitarian thinking strikes us as yet another fantasy. Much has changed since the solutions posited by humanist thinkers of the last century, so what can we do in this world? What can we bet [...]
About the impeachment of President Donald Trump she engineered with her Democratic majority, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday: "It's not personal. It's not political. It's not partisan. It's patriotic." Seriously, Madam Speaker? Not political? Not partisan? Why then were all eight House members chosen as managers to prosecute the case against Trump, who ceremoniously escorted the [...]
It is difficult to know when an era has ended. The events dominating the news today—presidential impeachment, deep state subversion of secret surveillance courts, confused and prolonged wars, out-of-control debt and government spending, and a radicalized educational and media culture—suggest something quite profound is threatening American governance. But it is not so clear precisely what. [...]
In mid-December, I had the pleasure and honour of taking part in a public debate in Hungary on Christian Democracy and its role in contemporary European politics. I was one of a panel of five “experts,” which included a German, a Pole, a Hungarian, and, last but not least, a fellow Englishman, Theodore Dalrymple, who [...]
Our age is undergoing what many have described as a “Great Realignment.” This is nowhere more true than among conservatives. The fusion that brought together under Ronald Reagan social conservatives, free marketers, and national defense hawks has largely un-fused of late. Many conservatives have begun to talk about a “dead consensus.”[1] Given the nature of [...]
Two months ago, crowds were in the streets of Iran cursing that regime for squandering the nation’s resources on imperial adventures in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen. Things were going America’s way. Now it is the Americans who are the targets of protests. Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship into a [...]
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary links the persecution of Christians in other parts of the globe to the increasing hostility towards mainstream Christianity in Europe. A “mysterious force seals the lips,” he asserts, not only of politicians in the West to this persecution, but also of most of those in the media. Is there, [...]
“It would be difficult to find anywhere in the history of politics a more powerful and potentially revolutionary doctrine than Rousseau’s theory of the General Will. Power is freedom and freedom is power,” Robert Nisbet argued in his magnum opus, 1953’s Quest for Community. […]
Only a fool would be blithely optimistic about the New Year. Those of us who have been seasoned by many seasons have seen enough old New Years to be cautious of their promises. Experience teaches us that each New Year does not ring out the old in order to ring in the new; it is [...]
Many scholars, heroes, and even martyrs among great Christian figures have either been forgotten or “sanitized” to meet modern standards. Others, like G.K. Chesterton, have simply become “deplorable”—i.e., utterly unacceptable to contemporary sensibilities. Is Mr. Ahlquist correct in deeming Chesterton a saint whom we might pray to rather than for? I leave that question up to [...]
At least since the time of the ancient philosopher Plato, private property rights have posed challenges to those aspiring to craft a just political society. During the nascent years of American civilization, the Pilgrim settlers of the New Plymouth Plantation followed a partly Platonic model of a commonwealth. The survival of their settlement, they initially [...]
Though counter-globalist, Cardinal Robert Sarah’s “The Day Is Now Far Spent” is not anti-Western, but is an emphatic rejection of liberal anthropology—which strikes him as blasphemous, positing a decontextualized individual, one who needs neither family nor neighbor nor even God Almighty. The Day Is Now Far Spent, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (385 pages, Ignatius Press, [...]
Held on July 15, the Tokyo March for Life is a beautiful celebration of the gift of life and also of the panoply of Asian and Pacific peoples and cultures. As Asians awaken from a nightmare of slaughter, people from around the world gather here to remember the darkness of the past, but also to [...]