To a very great extent, it was the Anti-Federalists, through their rhetoric and writings, who kept alive the spirit of localism and salvaged the great ideal of limited government inherited from the Revolution... The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) The Anti-Federalists who [...]
When I bought The Conservative Mind in 1994, I thought it was probably a book about how bad President Bill Clinton and the Democrats were—because that’s what I thought conservatism was. I was nineteen, a high school graduate with no intention of attending university, and thought “conservative” simply meant whatever Rush Limbaugh had talked about that day. [...]
Yoram Hazony’s "The Virtue of Nationalism" sees the world as composed of two “antithetical” types of government: universalist empires and free nation-states. The problem is that everything in the book is forced into that all-inclusive doctrinal dichotomy. The Virtue of Nationalism, by Yoram Hazony (305 pages, Basic Books, 2018) Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism has the [...]
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]
The farcical aftermath of Elizabeth Warren’s claims to have Native American blood has set me thinking about the utter madness of the world in which we live. In the first instance, what are we to think of someone who expresses elation at having a mere modicum of “native” blood? What does it say about her [...]
Rather than justify Jackson’s deeds, Bradley Birzer's "In Defense of Andrew Jackson" instead depicts its subject in the context of his own world. Whether one enters into its pages admiring or loathing Jackson, Dr. Birzer’s book is a must-read. In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Bradley Birzer (226 pages, Regnery History, 2018) Andrew Jackson, whom [...]
It was Donald Trump’s sense of fraternity that most incensed his opponents. For the liberals, it was his solidarity with people they thought deplorable. For the libertarians, it was the safety net he’d offer Americans. For both he was toxic, but his fraternity brought him to the sweet spot in American presidential politics, the place [...]
Despite all the unfounded fear on the left and all the equally unfounded euphoria on the right, there will be no wholesale revamping by the Supreme Court of the liberal social order that is now deeply rooted in our culture and among our people. The conservative justices' ethos of evolution over revolution will forestall any [...]
When we say Americans are divided and polarized, it can conjure up the image of cloth stretched to the point of ripping. However, this image does not represent everything we are experiencing as a society. Indeed, the social fabric is already torn. […]
The nation-state, along with a broadly Christian culture, has always been the surest foundation for a classically liberal order. America’s ideals depend not on tribal loyalty to universal propositions but on loyalty to the tribes—and little platoons—from which our ideals arise... How do you gauge the health of a civilization? There are geographic and demographic, [...]
After the shock of the 2016 election, liberals got a civics lesson on the electoral college established by the Constitution, and they didn’t like it. In "The Road to Unfreedom," Timothy Snyder speaks for them in bemoaning the fact that the founders created not a direct democracy but a republic. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, [...]
So the Bob Woodward has done it again. He has concocted yet another tell-all account of the mostly forgettable doings of yet another set of temporarily memorable Washington figures. And once again he has done so on the basis of unnamed sources. It’s all so tiresome and predictable. What was neither tiresome nor predictable was the work of [...]
Even before the spectacle of Christine Balsey Ford's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the hearing for President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was characterized not by political acumen, wit, cunning, or prudence, but by partisan obstruction, lawlessness, tantrums, hysteria, ignorance, frenzy, and anger. Protestors screamed vulgarities and trite slogans, proving [...]
In the early nineteenth century, Americans assumed that the Indians would fall in line with the United States, recognizing the young republic as the indisputable new Great Father. But the title, they quickly found out, had to be earned. In 1818, Indian Commissioner Benjamin Parke attempted to treat with the Miamis, Weas, and Delawares but [...]