From Tertullian, a North African Christian writer of the early third century, to the Reformation, there is a significant Christian tradition that affirms religious freedom. The origin story of religious liberty commonly cited in college courses and museums, informed by proponents of the so-called Whig view of history, goes something like this. In the West, [...]
For most of our history, the American liberal consensus held that the nation’s God was Christian. However, modernists undermined this consensus by welcoming in secular idols through the back door. They turned the temple into a pantheon. A great debate is raging among conservatives about the future of the movement. At stake is the classical [...]
Before legal codes were hammered into stone tablets, there were customs that enshrined a code of conduct for all warriors. And this code has always been founded on an unfathomable paradox: that those we kill we must also honor. It’s a familiar story. A soldier’s rage. In fairness, we might even call it righteous rage. There [...]
Always seeking a perch somewhere just slightly to the right of center, Senator David Durenberger regarded government as a problem-solver of something other than the first resort. Today he is not so sure. When Republicans Were Progressive, by Dave Durenberger (296 pages, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018) Long before the country was divided into blue [...]
Admitted in June 20, 1863 by ratifying the U.S. Constitution, West Virginia became the thirty-fifth state. It is known as “The Mountain State” with the West Virginia State Constitution in current use adopted in 1872. The story of how West Virginia became a state is an amazing story, full of constitutional intrigue and sleight-of-hand worthy [...]
A republic, by its very essence, imitates the highest of creation: man endowed with understanding and free will. Yet, in this greatest of strengths also resides the deepest of weaknesses. When the people enjoy true liberty, they often fail to identify its source, admiring its effects rather than its causes. In particular, they misunderstand the [...]
Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]
Recently, several statistical studies have shown that a decline in marriage rates may be associated with declining male success and male wages, relative to female wages. Do our men need to learn to deal with this, or will this shift in power between the sexes have significant and serious consequences? In January of 2019, Fox [...]
National Security Advisor John Bolton has thus far failed to maneuver the world into yet another Made-in-America Middle East conflict. Yet he might soon have the justification he wants. In the American lexicon there is never any such thing as wars of aggression. We prefer calling them wars of liberation. This has not been a [...]
While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]
The rise of a post-industrial, technologically advanced society affected social and economic structures worldwide. James Burnham and Daniel Bell foresaw how drastically society would change over the following decades, as well as the consequences of these tendencies toward globalism and liberalism. We like to say that every idea, every thought, every emotion—no matter how novel—has [...]
We moderns and post-moderns love to distort and corrupt our words. We take the most innocent of words—such as gay, love, and myth—and overburden them with grotesque unmeaning. Other terms, however—such as republic—we merely forget, conveniently. […]
The West has been undone by consumerism, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization—all defended by modern conservatives as “the price we must pay” to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. As Russell Kirk argued, the principal function of government is not to ensure the material security and comfort of its citizenry. [...]
Somehow Joseph Stalin cannot be reduced merely to just another Russian autocrat or just another communist dictator. Not for him the “banality of evil.”… Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 By Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Press, 2014) Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator By Oleg Khlevniuk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Yale University Press, 2015) The Last [...]