Sexual misconduct is usually characterized as some kind of “power grab,” typically carried out by ruthless men seeking to prey upon the vulnerability of a woman. Yet Plato suggests that disordered sexual desire is a problem of the democratic soul. Speaking about British actress Kadian Noble’s lawsuit filed against Harvey Weinstein on the grounds of [...]
A nuclear-armed Iran is something that the world community should strive to prevent, but in the long run our pushing Iran into a corner will be detrimental to both the United States and Israel… 1. Iran is the Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism The State Department has been regurgitating this mindless drivel for decades and [...]
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 [...]
Neither the leftist Marxist multiculturalists nor the Neoconservatives reflect the genuine beliefs or inheritance left to us by those who came to these shores centuries ago. Both reject the historic conservatism of the South, which embodied that inheritance and the vision of the Founders… No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to [...]
What has alarmed me most as I moved away from liberalism—or as it moved away from me—was how quick my liberal friends were to renounce and reject our delicate social fabric as oppressive, as exclusionary, or as just plain worthless. Churches? Schools? Communities? Not just anachronisms, according to the New Liberalism, but dangerous threats to [...]
Just who and what is Barack Obama? If he “willed himself into being,” what did he will himself to be?… Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow (1472 pages, HarperCollins, 2017) Having read the entirety of this unnecessarily, even ridiculously, lengthy biography of Barack Obama, I trust that I am well-qualified to [...]
Michael Oakeshott’s conception of conservatism was not without its critics. Among them was the American intellectual and self-avowed conservative, Irving Kristol… In 1956, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott published “On Being Conservative,”[1] a statement of “the conservative disposition” as he conceived it. Although largely well received, Oakeshott’s conception of conservatism was not without its critics. [...]
Patrick Deneen has entitled his book Why Liberalism Failed, but by his own analysis, he could have entitled it Why Liberalism Succeeded… Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen (248 pages, Yale University Press, 2018) In his comprehensive condemnation of three hundred years of modern liberalism, Patrick Deneen at one point speaks of “advanced liberalism,” and [...]
“They say you won’t succeed because ‘making a man President cannot change him,'” Julia Sand wrote. “But making a man President can change him! If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine.” On September 22, 1881, Chester Alan Arthur was sworn in as the twenty-first President [...]
Much has been written in recent years about the increasing polarization in American politics. Republicans have moved further to the right, while Democrats have moved further to the left. And seldom do they even attempt to meet anywhere in the middle. The phenomenon is undeniable. It’s observable on a daily basis and confirmed by polling [...]
The sorriest aspect of the twentieth century has been the rallying of the intellectuals to the arrogant banner of nationalism, which rejects universal and eternal truth for the sake of national and passing advantage… Thirty years ago, a book was published about which a great many people talk, but which few have really read: La [...]
As if to create the cruelest irony possible, as the terrorist ideologies arose, Americans surrendered their own republican inheritance, their own Augustinian and Puritan caution, and their traditionally humane morality to the new god: “Progress.” It was nothing less than a new faith… When did it all go wrong? As Christopher Dawson used to note [...]
Our heritage of foreign intervention is a new one, an innovation introduced by the progressives. To imagine a clean and humane progressivism is, simply, a fool’s errand. Just how much imperialism is in the DNA—so to write—of the American character? When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American [...]
For many ethical progressives, there is an absence of active malice. They are most likely to see their own condescension as a kind of empathy for the less fortunate. Their goal is to help the poor and working classes escape the forces that progressives see as oppressing the poor and powerless… For those of us [...]