Is Time itself best understood by those things in life which are Time-less? Such is the main question posed in my play, “The Habsburg Manifesto.” It is not a political play but a philosophical one, whose main theme is the inner nobility of the individual as that which withstands and transcends all politics, all ideology, [...]
Progressives lack imagination, and, in their desire to create a world made in their image, they can only mimic what they see with straight, sterile lines. When considering that Thomas Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address in 1801—perhaps the finest statement up to that point in history on the dignity of the Western and Socratic [...]
Human nature exists, and we cannot deal with life in a sensible way without accepting that. So the question we face is how to overcome an outlook that categorically rejects the very concept and is deeply rooted in the way the people who dominate our political life understand the world… Today’s offering in our Timeless [...]
The fear and suspicion of ideas and intellect rest on historical foundations buried deep in the American consciousness. Many Americans, in fact, have long disparaged the life of the mind, and populist democracy has increasingly required an appeal to vulgarity and ignorance… The mistrust of ideas and intellect that has long prevailed among a substantial [...]
President Trump was right to defend the West, a civilization which goes back to the Homeric epic and the Hebrew prophets, and having been baptized by Christ, is “not the property of any particular race but the universal aspiration of humankind”… In an essay for The Atlantic earlier this month, Peter Beinart, an associate professor [...]
The city of Santa Rosa, just north of San Francisco, has declared a “homeless emergency.” This entails “allowing” the homeless to live in their cars year-round instead of only in winter and inclement weather. There also will be some additional services for homeless people. San Francisco itself decided to address this growing problem by adding [...]
A recent essay published by The Imaginative Conservative asserted, somewhat pessimistically, that “progressivism will win.” Without wishing to engage that particular essay, I’d like to argue that progressivism is actually doomed to lose. Perhaps, however, and as is always wise, we should define what we mean by “progressivism.” […]
Understanding Progressivism and the Progressive Era is one of the most important tasks for intellectual defenders of ordered liberty. In just under two generations, Progressivism captured the minds of the American intellectual class, which then transformed traditional governance institutions into the modern bureaucratic-administrative state. As Thomas C. Leonard shows in his new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, [...]
Where have all the grown-ups gone, Long time passing? Where have all the grown-ups gone, Long time ago? Those of my generation might recall the song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, a hit record by the Kingston Trio, among others, composed by Pete Seeger. Part of the folk music revival of the 1950s and [...]
One of the most interesting developments of the post-Bush years has been the resurgence of the popularity of the term “progressivism.” With that popularity has come, of course, a resurgence of the ideas traditionally associated with progressivism, though highly sanitized. Some very good and well-intentioned scholars and commentators—who in general are NOT aligned with the [...]
It is not simply that carnivores eat meat—that hardly justifies the news headline*—nor that cute bears eat meat or even (cover your children’s eyes) kill other animals for the meat that they need rather than, say, buy it by the bucketful from KFC. That is not funny enough. This is—scientists have seen warm, cuddly, innocent, [...]
When the forces of American progressivism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, those who would one day be labeled as conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians found themselves quite ill-prepared for the intellectual and political onslaught. Perhaps the best analyst at the time progressivism emerged, somewhat surprisingly, was E.L. Godkin, the venerable founder of The Nation. [...]
Russell Kirk In the early 1950s, intellectuals on both the Right and the Left who were at odds about almost everything, agreed on one thing: Conservatism as a defined philosophy and movement scarcely existed in America. Respected intellectuals on the Left such as Lionel Trilling argued that modern “liberalism is not only the [...]
“America is hard to see,” wrote Robert Frost, not least because there is a duality to the American mind. Americans have long exalted freedom, often depicting themselves as its unique beneficiaries. At the same time, they have more than once altered the meaning of freedom and have just as often disagreed among themselves about its [...]