The Left does not like the idea of human nature. It tells them they are not free to do what they want. From a factual perspective, it tells them people do not change much, so the way things were in the past is mostly how they will be in the future. From a moral perspective, [...]
There is legitimate debate over whether “progressive liberalism” constitutes a radical departure from, and even betrayal of, the basic commitments of “classical liberalism,” or whether it represents the next logical step in liberalism’s development. Both positions have merit. Many of the original architects of “progressive liberalism” begin with an explicit rejection of several of the [...]
While many across the political spectrum would like to discover the secret of Ronald Reagan’s success, some conservatives, believing the fortieth president a high priest of the American civil religion, have dismissed him as a barely closeted progressive who blithely saw the good in all. After all, it is always morning in America… While one might [...]
My wife has just sent me two links showing a linguistic family tree illustrating the relationship of the various modern European and Oriental languages with their Indo-European roots.[1] This use of a tree-metaphor to encapsulate the living traditionalism at the heart of language was one of the imaginative roots of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation of the tree-like [...]
Britain’s The Independent newspaper, second in Progressivism to The Guardian, reports that scientists may be able to clone a woolly mammoth within a human generation. There the problems start. Nicknamed Buttercup, the 2.3-metre beast was discovered frozen in Siberia, having succumbed to swamps and predators some 40,000 years ago. She is missing a leg but [...]
There are few better illustrations of the clash between conservative values and progressive ideologies than the church architecture wars of the last fifty years. Although traditional architecture was dismissed by most Christian denominations, the conflict comes into focus most clearly within the Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s ushered in the most [...]
Ernest Hemingway lived and breathed American religious nationalism. But the experience of war caused him to lose his faith in the American nation he inherited from the progressive Protestant establishment. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson breathed a sigh of relief. A passionate progressive and Presbyterian elder committed [...]
When I heard the bad news, I was struggling with a mug of particularly nasty instant coffee in Kathmandu, trying to get my head around a report that gadgets now outnumber human beings; and while our global population grows at two people per second, mobile telephones now proliferate five times faster. This was worse; a [...]
While recuperating from a knee and shoulder injury, I used my forced idleness to read two very different English writers: the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon and the twentieth-century mystery novelist John Buchan. Despite the gravity of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Mr. Gibbon, it turns out, shared at least one assumption [...]
Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a self-proclaimed “Progressive,” many American conservative intellectuals have become convinced that resistance to Progressivism is the essence of their cause. They believe the American political tradition, flowing from the philosopher John Locke, is grounded in the immutable “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and preeminently in the [...]
Richard Weaver introduces Ideas Have Consequences (1948) by explaining that at the root of “the dissolution of the West” is modern man’s denial of universal truth and his progressive assumption that “the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development.” Enlightenment thought attacked transcendental truth via the battering rams of nominalism, empiricism, [...]
Constitutional Government and Democracy by Carl J. Friedrich (Little, Brown and co. 1941) Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do by Cass R. Sunstein What a difference a few decades can make—even or perhaps especially among “progressives” at Harvard. A useful case in point is provided by one of the current “demigods,” Cass Sunstein, who seems to infest every aspect [...]
Much of the progressivist contempt for the past is not merely arrogance or ignorance but is a response to a perceived threat, a reaction caused by a fear of the other. The past is a different country, they do things differently there. The past is strange. It is populated by strangers; by foreigners. For those [...]
We live in very mean-spirited times. In spite of all the hypocritical cant about “love” and “tolerance” it can be shown that there is little real difference between the superciliousness of “progressivist” snobbery and the most pernicious forms of racism. If, for example, we were to visit a village in a remote corner of Africa [...]